Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell Whip Into Theaters With a Top Summer Spectacle
DIRECTOR: LEE ISAAC CHUNG/2024
This is going to be the summer of Glen Powell, and we’re just living in it.
I made this declaration in May during my summer movie preview on KMOV. Look, I’m no fortune teller, but when I’m right, I’m right.
The joy of Twisters is that in spite of its empyrean spectacle, it always stays grounded. Like director Lee Isaac Chung’s breakthrough Minari, this legacy sequel is a slice-of-life story, not a larger-than-life epic. This is also true of the original Twister, though you don’t need to refresh yourself on that ‘90s hit before you see this legacy sequel. (Though you should, as you’re only robbing yourself of a good time if you don’t.) Aside from resurfacing the same tech that Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt used and playing with similar archetypes, Twisters is not beholden to its IP.
In this new action-adventure, our heroine is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a meteorologist haunted by the dark side of storm chasing. After five years of hiding from her bad memories at a New York branch of the National Weather Service, her past catches up with her. Her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) is running a tech company trying to create the first 3-D scan of a tornado, but he knows he can’t do it without Kate’s sixth sense for storms. Just as Oklahoma enters an extreme weather pattern, she returns to her home state to help his life-saving work. But they aren’t alone in their tornado hunting: A cocky storm chaser keeps riding their tail to create online content with his team’s collection of drones, rockets, and merchandise. Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) calls himself a Tornado Wrangler—will his showmanship get in the way of their mission, or could he be the key to completing their research?
There’s no such question if Powell is the key to the success of Twisters. Tyler Owens pays homage to Paxton, Cary Elwes, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s roles in the 1996 film, but you can’t accuse him of recycling material. Tyler is a conduit to put Powell’s singular charisma on blast—heck, he even has chemistry with the tornadoes themselves. Here, a thunderstorm is an excuse for him to traipse through the rain in a white T-shirt or a half-buttoned Henley, a silly but timeless movie star power move. He is the biggest force to be reckoned with in this film, and between this, Hit Man, and Anyone But You, he’s signaling he’s a potential F5 about to whip through Hollywood.
This strength, however, only makes its lone weakness more glaring: Glen Powell has a leading lady problem. Big personalities can sweep others into a charisma vacuum, and Sydney Sweeney, Adria Arjona, and now Daisy Edgar-Jones can’t compete with his magnetism. Edgar-Jones was one the better parts of the boring Where the Crawdads Sing last summer, but here she’s saddled with another trauma-laden character, which is not what you want from a franchise whose most popular line is, “We got cows!” In her best moments, she gets to have fun, but the sassy one-liners with Powell are too few and far between. Her muted performance isn’t incompatible with the way Kate is written, but it’s inert next to his. (Does he have more chemistry her mother, Maura Tierney? Perhaps I’m seeing it through this summer’s lens of The Idea of You and A Family Affair.) Powell has acted against male co-stars who match or exceed his presence even though Tom Cruises, Miles Tellers, and Jonathan Majors don’t grow on trees (especially now that Majors’s work has evaporated just as fast as it touched down). So why is Zoey Deutch is the only love interest who has matched his charms in Netflix’s Set It Up? Let’s get him in a rom-com toe-to-toe stat with Ana de Armas, Jennifer Lawrence, Keke Palmer, Margot Robbie, or Emma Stone!
Do the mismatched leads suck the fun out of Twisters? Hardly. Chung reminds us a lot of fun can be had with minimal use of CGI and that a lot of tension can be created with a stressed close-up and wind and rain machines. I have zero idea if the science behind this story is sound, but who cares? It pays heed to the logic it sets up and explains it so well it makes me wonder if meteorology is a much cooler career than I ever gave it credit for. With its spectacle and character-driven narrative, it’s platonic ideal of franchise entertainment, so let’s not just declare this the summer of Glen Powell—it’s the summer of Twisters.