Was I living a sheltered life in 1996? My memory was that nobody much liked Jan de Bont’s windy follow-up to Speed. Two hours of Americans driving around in jeeps yelling “Yeehaw!” when they weren’t yelling “Woo-hoo!”? Bad weather failing to offer the threat Godzilla might once have provided? No thanks. “Twister can go back to being identified first with a helical ice lolly,” I probably didn’t exactly say.
How wrong I was. The film proved the second-highest grossing of the year and, just 28 years later, has generated a sequel that, while no masterpiece, feels perfectly serviceable in the era of lore-addicted trash such as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
It begins with Americans driving around yelling both “Yeehaw!” and “Woo-hoo!” Daisy Edgar-Jones is Kate Cooper, part of a research team that also includes characters played by the Irish actor Daryl McCormack and by Sally Draper out of Mad Men. Following the expected tornado-related disaster – tragic prologues are becoming a convention of the Twister universe – Kate finds herself in the weather department of a New York TV station. Well, that won’t last. Sure enough, Anthony Ramos, playing a former pal on the “Woo-hoo!” circuit, turns up to lure her back to storm chasing with talk of new meteorological technology that I would explain to you if I had been listening.
Twister came at a point of inflexion for the culture. We knew what the internet was, but it had yet to infest every corner of our lives. Inevitably the competition this time comes from a YouTube channel. This is where the “Yeehaw!” really gets going. Whereas Kate’s new team are all goodie-goodie – which ultimately means baddie-baddie – with their crisp white vehicles paid for by sinister men in bolo neckties, Tyler Owens’s posse is ... well, a posse. Owens, played by the unavoidable Glen Powell, is a loose-talking rogue with a huge belt buckle. Sasha Lane revisits her American Honey persona as a wild-haired sidekick. We know Harry Hadden-Paton, playing an accompanying journo, is English as he is bald and buttons his shirt right up to the neck.
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Without wishing to overdignify a Twister sequel, what we have here is a (Howard) Hawksian battle of the sexes between smart working people. That hands Powell the Cary Grant role and – if we’re talking Only Angels Have Wings rather than His Girl Friday – asks Edgar-Jones to embody the spirit of Jean Arthur. They do all right with that impossible brief. Powell has the ability to find fizzes of charm in professional and personal arrogance. Edgar-Jones, building on that Normal People breakthrough, is less comfortable with the comedy but has a good turn in cocked-head exasperation.
One almost wishes that, after squabbling beneath the wide skies, the couple didn’t have to go back to chasing tornadoes, but this is a €200 million movie, so tornadoes there must be. Here we again encounter the original film’s core problem. The twisters prove a suitably elegant shark stand-in when viewed from a distance, but, once the threat properly arrives, it proves to be so much uncontrollable blusteriness. Rather than a keenly focused danger, we have a random mass of chaos that defies the accumulation of tension. Eyes glaze over after the third or fourth building reduces itself to match wood.
All that complained about, Lee Isaac Chung, director of the stratospherically dissimilar Minari, does put together a proper action comedy with satisfactory set-up, charming romance and diverting denouement. Twisters feels no need to offer footnotes and variation on its predecessor. It’s a big fat summer movie in its own right. And that’s something these days.
