Film review: Twisters remake is a blast from start to finish

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell have a convincing chemistry on screen

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell star in Twisters

• Twisters
• ★★★★☆ 
• Cinematic release

The words “once-in-a-generation tornado outbreak” should be sufficient to get any reasonable person making plans to depart the afflicted continent on the very next flight out, but Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is made of sterner stuff than most.

Twisters (12A) opens with Kate cheering on her fellow scientists as they barrel towards a massive tornado in order to set in train their experimental Tornado Tamer Program.

Five years later, a wiser, sadder and guilt-ridden Kate reluctantly joins her old comrade Javi (Anthony Ramos) as he seeks to deploy military-grade radar to predict outbreaks in Oklahoma’s tornado alley — their scientific approach in stark contrast to that of “the hillbilly tornado wrangler” Tyler (Glen Powell), who is never happier than when driving his customised truck into the heart of a twister for YouTube clicks.

Lee Isaac Chung’s actioner is a throwback to the classic disaster movies of the ’70s, when plot was considerably less important than the visual spectacle.

While there’s a decent plot in play here — science geek Kate’s quiet intuition clashing with the reckless Tyler’s yee-haw populism — it’s the spectacular special effects that truly grip (FX supervisor Scott Fisher has previously worked on Ad Astra, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer and Top Gun: Maverick).

A blast from start to finish, and one that frequently takes the audience right into the whirling maelstrom, Twisters is also persuasive in its quieter moments — with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell generating a convincing chemistry as their opposites attract.