REVIEW: Twisters gets blown a little bit off course

Welcome to the whacky world of tornado taming AKA tornado wrangling. And it is urgent. There are areas where tornadoes are getting ever more frequent, more and more devastating and causing increasing loss of life. It’s a battle against time to find a way to stop them.

On the one hand, we have serious scientist Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a woman damaged by past trauma in which three of her best mates died storm-chasing. Her tragedy is that she blames herself. On the other hand, we have media-circus YouTuber Tyler (Glen Powell) with a showy entourage in tow, all apparently in it for the social media attention. Instantly the two are off on the wrong footing. Kate, dragged back into it all, is wanting to end suffering and other serious-minded things. Tyler, it seems, is in it for the kicks and the clicks.

But slowly and utterly predictably, something starts to happen. It seems that the company Kate is working for is morally compromised, and it turns out that Tyler is actually something more than the showman he projects himself as, and far from blowing each other off course in a ferocious competition which will help no one, there’s a rather fairer wind that’s actually bringing them together, the attraction of opposites amid all the destruction that’s being wreaked around them.

And the attraction is nicely done. Edgar-Jones is terrific at doing damaged intensity whereas Powell has got a charisma which comes as naturally – and as powerfully – as the tornadoes do. And just as predictably.

The trouble is that this is a film which gets bogged down in its own sense of menace. It seriously, damagingly dips in the middle. Far too many times do we watch our heroes go tearing off into the eye of the storm; far too much time is spent watching people clinging to things horizontally while all their worldly goods hurtle past them.

The effects are terrific but they really do become just a bit repetitive, plus the fact that, presumably, deliberately for the most part we haven’t got a clue what’s happening. Tyler is intent on shooting flares up the tornado’s bottom (he used a different word) while Kate has got lots of barrels on the back of a truck which, if timed correctly, squirt something else entirely up into the storm. Heaven knows what they are. You don’t exactly come away knowing an awful lot more about tornadoes. But you come away, given their apparent frequency, wondering how on earth there is anything at all left standing in Oklahoma.

However, after a soggy middle, the film manages to up the ante for an impressive finale, all based on the rather predictable premise that we all stand a much better chance if we all work together. Both approaches have got their place as Kate and Tyler converge creating their own little storm. And even if the whole thing, as you leave the cinema, feels just a bit underwhelming, at least – in a pretty duff summer for cinema – it’s a big step up on the films that have been blowing our way in recent weeks.