Producers: Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley   Director: Lee Isaac Chung    Screenwriter: Mark L. Smith Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane, Harry Hadden-Paton, David Corenswet, Daryl McCormack, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brian, Nik Donadi, Kiernan Shipka, David Born and Paul Scheer   Distributor: Universal

Grade: C

A hokey romantic triangle set against the storm-swept skies of rural Oklahoma, “Twisters” aims to recapture the excitement of Jan de Bont’s 1996 blockbuster, one of the first to convince audiences of the visceral potential of CGI integrated with live-action footage.  Nearly thirty years later, the CGI possibilities have increased exponentially, and director Lee Isaac Chung and his effects supervisors (Ben Snow and Scott R. Fisher) take advantage of them to the full. 

But after so many imitators over the years (some of them spoofs), the result doesn’t possess the same visual punch as “Twister,” whose narrative beats, moreover, it aims to copy too slavishly. And for a movie made by the man who treated the characters in “Minari” with such insight and sensitivity, the people it inserts into its numerous tornadic set-pieces are little more than stick-figures about whom it’s impossible to care.  Of course, the characters in “Twister” were pretty much free of any depth too, but at the time, the sheer propulsive energy rendered that of negligible significance.  In the present era dominated by CGI spectacle, that’s no longer the case.    

A prologue set five years in the past introduces two of the three leads—Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Javi (Anthony Ramos).  Along with classmates Addy (Kiernan Shipka), Praveen (Nik Donadi) and Jeb (Daryl McCormack), Kate’s boyfriend, they were all chasing an Oklahoma tornado in hopes of testing Kate’s college science project, a “tornado tamer” requiring getting drums of polymers into the funnel’s eye to starve it of power.  Unfortunately, it proved a much bigger storm than expected, and Addy, Praveen and Jeb were all sucked up by it.  Kate watched them die but survived, and Javi, scanning a computer some distance away, was unharmed.

As a result of the experience, however, Kate was, like so many protagonists in today’s movies, traumatized, and took a job with the National Weather Service in faraway New York, where her ability to intuit tornadic behavior sets her apart.  After half a decade Javi shows up, asking her to become part of a team he’s assembled back in Oklahoma to test a trio of devices designed to map a tornado’s interior.  But the apparatuses must be placed close around a tornado to work, and Javi believes that only Kate can determine one’s path precisely enough to allow that. She’s reluctant to come back to where her mother Cathy (Maura Tierney) still resides—the homestead holds painful memories of Jeb and her work with him—but finally agrees.

Javi’s outfit is a business shared with rigid, profit-conscious Scott (David Corenswet) and funded by Riggs (David Born), a property developer.  But before Kate can accompany then on a first run, there arrives another crew, headed by good-old-boy Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a self-styled “tornado wrangler” whose exploits on YouTube have attracted a huge following.  The showboating Arkansan’s team—videographer Boone (Brandon Perea), drone operator Lilly (Sasha Lane), mechanic Dani (Katy O’Brian), and scientist Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe)—come off as wild and reckless as he is.  And they have a tagalong guest—nervous English reporter Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton).

It’s inevitable that the tornado whisperer and the tornado wrangler will become a couple by the movie’s end—Mark L. Smith’s script even manages a variant on the old “he pursues her to the airport as she’s leaving” cliché, though this time it includes a bit involving Tyler’s specially-outfitted truck that leaves an officious cop (Paul Scheer) flummoxed.  (The fact that Riggs is a vulture preying on tornado victims doesn’t help the infatuated fellow’s case with Kate, though he does repent.)                     

But the romantic business plays second fiddle to the encounters with twisters, which are depicted here as arising with a suddenness that catches everyone unawares.  One abruptly strikes as Kate and Tyler attend a rodeo (he once was a rider, it’s revealed), and another—the monster at the close—comes while a small town is unconcernedly hosting a street festival.  The implausibility of this will be evident to anyone who actually lives in tornado alley.  Conditions favorable for severe weather in the area are predicted days in advance, and thunderstorms and tornados are rigorously tracked in the media.  But the tornados here are treated like sharks that attack without warning—though unlike in the “Sharknado” flicks, no real sharks appear in them.  (Some viewers might wish they did. The flying cow from the first movie is absent, too.)

If one sets aside all that (and it’s certainly true that, despite advances in forecasting, tornados can form with alarming speed), the tornado sequences are pretty impressive, if not entirely credible, their heavy CGI all too apparent.  The impact on a field of wind turbines at one point and an oil refinery at another brings satisfyingly big-boned, explosive results.  The final disaster, however, resorts to cheesy touches (the Little Leaguer dropping her bat on the plate as the wind revs up) and ludicrous attempts to save folks (herding them into an old movie theatre that happens to be showing the 1931 “Frankenstein,” of all things, with the “It’s alive” scene showing as the single screen is whipped away by the wind, revealing the devastated center of town).  This seems to be an Oklahoma without storm shelters or basements—a fantasy state.  And editor Terilyn A. Shropshire seems reluctant to leave off the disaster footage before it gets slightly dull.

The non-tornado material looks okay, with Patrick M. Sullivan’s production design and Eunice Jera Lee’s costumes more than adequate and Dan Mindel’s widescreen cinematography good if not particularly elegant.  Benjamin Wallfisch’s score sounds decent, when it isn’t being drowned out by all the whooshing and crashing.

As to the cast, Powell cements his growing reputation as an old-fashioned leading man, gleefully embodying Tyler’s ultra-macho style and morphing well into his sensitive side.  Edgar-Jones is somewhat less successful conveying Kate’s combination of brilliance and guilt, but gets by, while Ramos’s hangdog manner is understandable, given that he’s the inevitable third wheel in the romance department.  Elsewhere Tierney adds a note of gravitas as Kate’s mom in the inevitable sequence when Kate finally visits the homestead and achieves closure, especially after Tyler arrives and they decide to work together to finish her old project; the others just go along with the personality tics the screenplay demands, though some (Perea most notably) overdo it.  Corenswet is stiff and dull as Scott; what that bodes for his upcoming Superman/Clark Kent remains to be seen.

In sum, “Twisters” is yet another long-delayed sequel that, except in the technical area, doesn’t live up to its predecessor.