Twisters has been branded the ‘blockbuster of the summer’ by critics as the tornado movie sweeps into cinemas almost 30 years after the original.
The sequel stars Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Top Gun Maverick’s Glen Powell as competing storm chasers, with the flick declared the ‘best cinematic experience’ since 2022’s Maverick which raked in $1B at the box office.
In her five star review The Standard’s Maddy Mussen described Twisters as ‘equal parts thrilling and emotional’ and branded Daisy and Glenn as ‘natural leads’.
Writing that while the film failed to mention climate change it was nevertheless a ‘thrilling, smarter-than-it-seems blockbuster’ that left her ‘wanting more’.
Meanwhile The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey was also impressed and gave the film four out of five stars claiming the story is ‘intense to the point of frightening’.
Twisters has been branded the ‘blockbuster of the summer’ by critics as the tornado movie sweeps into cinemas (L-R) Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, Glenn Powell
The sequel stars Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Top Gun Maverick’s Glen Powell as as competing storm chasers
The flick declared the ‘best cinematic experience’ since 2022’s Maverick which raked in $1B at the box office (Tom Cruise pictured in Maverick)
Writing: ‘The callbacks [to the original] thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old-school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects’.
In The Telegraph Robbie Collin was full of praise and said the film was the ‘best cinematic experience’ since Top Gun: Maverick.
The formula is so simple it’s amazing it ever fell out of fashion: everyday heroes you can’t help but root for (Edgar-Jones and the never-more-Tom-Cruise-like Powell are both magnetic’.
‘Time and again, [the film] deploys the classic Spielbergian trick of spending more time watching his actors react to danger – loose-jawed and lantern-eyed – than ogling the danger itself’.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw also pointed out the ‘fun film’ was ‘coy’ about mentioning climate change and it’s effects on our weather.
He concluded the tornado was in fact a metaphor for an orgasm in the budding romance between the two lead characters.
Empire’s Beth Webb wrote the movie four stars and said the action flick had the ‘stakes and suspense of a horror film’.
‘Simply put, Twisters wears its Big Summer Movie heart on its sleeve’.
The Standard ‘s Maddy Mussen described the action flick in her five star review as ‘equal parts thrilling and emotional’ and branded Daisy and Glenn as ‘natural leads’
Meanwhile The Independent’ s Clarisse Loughrey was also impressed and gave the film four out of five stars claiming the story is ‘intense to the point of frightening’
In The Telegraph Robbie Collin was full of praise and said the film was the ‘best cinematic experience’ since Top Gun: Maverick
Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton pictured in 1996 original
‘At one point, our heroes are quite literally ushering crowds into a movie theatre for shelter. And you’d do well to join them’.
Meanwhile Daily Mail’s Brian Viner wrote in his four star review: ‘I did some more laughing out loud during Twisters, so strenuously blow-hard are the efforts to turn the weather into what amounts to a monster movie’.
The killer tornadoes ripping through Oklahoma are plainly the equivalents of Godzilla or alien invaders or the Great White in Jaws, especially as nobody, not even crack meteorologist Kate Cooper (Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones), seeks to explain them as, just possibly, a consequence of climate change.
That said, Lee Isaac Chung’s film thunders along with impressive verve and energy as Kate, seeking redemption following a tragedy five years earlier by attempting to show that tornadoes can actually be shrunk by scientific intervention, hooks up with a charismatic self-styled ‘tornado-wrangler’ called Tyler Owens (Glen Powell).
This might all be nonsense, but it’s very watchable nonsense, with a nice comic turn from Harry Hadden-Paton as a hapless English reporter, who is there to write a story about the phenomenon of chasing twisters across the American plains.
It might also be credible nonsense, if you’re the sort of person, as I am, who believes that anyone who drops ‘super-absorbent polymers’ into a sentence probably knows what they’re talking about.
Incidentally, I saw Twisters at its European premiere in London last week, where it was introduced by Chung himself. ‘I hope (after seeing it) all you Londoners will never complain about the weather again,’ he said.
I don’t think we can make that promise. Asking us to stop moaning about the weather is like asking us to take a pledge never again to drink tea or praise Sir David Attenborough; we’d be butchering our national identity.
But I took his point. We don’t (yet) live in a country where you can wind up in the next county without leaving your front room, so thank goodness for that.
