Twisters Parent Guide

Kate (Daisy Edgar Jones) is an eager young college student with the admirable goal of reducing the frequency and intensity of tornadoes in Oklahoma’s infamous “Tornado Alley”. To this end, she’s come up with a chemical which, when dispersed into a forming twister, will cause it to collapse into itself before it causes serious damage to life or property. The first test ends in disaster, failing to end the storm and causing the death of three of her fellow students.

Five years later, Kate has desk job at a weather station in New York, and hasn’t returned to Oklahoma. She’s content to stay desk-bound – until the other survivor of her test, Javi (Anthony Ramos) invites her down to help him make some comprehensive tornado scans. While helping him out, Kate meets self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” Tyler (Glen Powell), a reckless storm chaser with a massive internet following. As Javi and his team of scientists race Tyler’s ragtag followers from storm to storm, it becomes clear that the cost of these storms is growing. And Kate still wants to do something about it…if she can.

The film plays out as you would expect – inane personal drama intercut with some digital tornadoes mangling small-town Oklahoma. Do you want to wade through an hour and a half of insufferable online content creators and fans duking it out with polo-shirted corporate lackeys in motel parking lots in the middle of nowhere? If so, your reward is to watch that same jolly bunch of annoying twits try to kill each other on the road so they can get a closer look at or shoot fireworks into a natural disaster visible for miles in any direction. I think the film is hoping that Glen Powell’s winning Ken-doll smile and a soupcon of spectacle will carry this big summer blockbuster, but I’m not sure it works.

Maybe I just can’t stand the twangy stadium-country score that begrimes the runtime like a sticky handprints on playground equipment, but I couldn’t even enjoy the titular twisters. Most of them occur (luckily for the residents of Oklahoma) in the middle of fields, which doesn’t make for much of a scene. As the film winds on, the storms find increasingly interesting things to destroy, but by that point I’m just waiting for the credits. In between the storms, the movie’s pacing drops off a cliff, and the two-hour runtime distorts the passage of time like a black hole.

Apparently most other critics liked this flick more than I did, so you might view Twisters as a dumb-fun disaster flick. It’s a pretty safe choice – while people are definitely killed in the tornadoes, it’s almost all off-screen. Scattered profanity, some bloody but non-fatal injuries, and some brief social drinking are about all you need to worry about. I wouldn’t bring a four-year-old to the show (as one lady in my theater did), but older kids and teens shouldn’t have any trouble – provided they don’t make the same mistake I did and get bogged down in the swamp of banal subplots.