Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Carter, Anthony Ramos as Javi and Glen Powell as Tyler Owens in a scene from "Twisters." (Photo courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures; Amblin Entertainment).
We're over the Fourth of July hump, and that means it's time for summer movie releases to go full throttle. A pair of high-profile titles — one a thrill ride that's a follow-up to a 28-year-old hit, the other an FBI procedural with more than a dash of the occult — aim to quicken filmgoers' pulse and maybe cause them to grab their armrest, and perhaps their date's elbow, a little tighter than usual.
One of these box office contenders is gunning to take a bite of the North American box office after causing a stir overseas. The other is hoping to maintain its word-of-mouth momentum following a higher-than-expected opening weekend haul. Are they worth braving the multiplex crowds (or lack thereof if you're going on a weeknight)? Let's find out.
Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Carter and Glen Powell as Tyler Owens in a scene from "Twisters." (Photo courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures; Amblin Entertainment).
“Twisters”: The forecast calls for recycled cyclones, with a steady stream of computer-generated imagery and a hailstorm of people in peril. Director Jan de Bont turned tornado panic into big business in the summer of 1996 with “Twister,” but it's safe to say the teens and twentysomethings who grew up watching this very loud, very dumb demolition derby on cable were clamoring for a very-late-in-the-game legacy sequel to a movie that has its defenders, but if we're being honest, was never all that good to begin with.
And, as director Lee Isaac Chung's new Tornado Alley yarn opens, it appears to follow in its predecessor's narrative footsteps, depicting a deadly brush with Mother Nature that will serve as a traumatic event for our protagonist. This time, it's college student Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who wants to try out an experiment with her fellow storm chasers: launch barrels filled with a sodium polyacrylate solution into a tornado to see if this ingredient can lessen the weather phenomenon's intensity.
In a time-honored tradition of supposedly smart people behaving with gobsmacking stupidity, these squeaky clean mavericks roll the dice by trying out Kate's science project out in the field. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith inserts a brutal dose of Murphy's Law. The winds pick up abruptly, and tragedy strikes. But none of it registers dramatically. Chung stages the chaos with such bloodless restraint that he deprives viewers from the visceral pangs of loss.
Glen Powell as Tyler Owens, Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Carter and Maura Tierney as Cathy in a scene from "Twisters." (Photo courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures; Amblin Entertainment).
Fast forward five years, and continuing with the lapses in logic, Kate is working at the New York City office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Because staying in the same field linked with the harrowing trauma you feel at least partly responsible for is a perfectly understandable career path. All of a sudden, a face from the past pops up. Javi (“In the Heights'” Anthony Ramos), who survived that terrible ordeal, comes to her with a proposal: to join his company's team for a week in Oklahoma and help test out high-tech system with the capacity of scanning tornadoes.
Clearly, a smart woman like Kate will tell Javi to take a hike, but that would make too much sense. She reluctantly agrees to tag along and offer her near-mystical gift for predicting where a tornado will go. Javi's team quickly crosses paths with rival chasers, a motley crew of YouTubers headed by the arrogant, brash and devilishly handsome Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), nicknamed the “Tornado Wrangler.” You've likely come across overconfident men like Tyler before, in life and online. This Texas dude wears what Dolly Parton would call painted-on jeans with a matching cowboy hat. His conceited viral hijinks will likely make your eyes roll.
Sasha Stone as Lily and Glen Powell as Tyler Owens in a scene from "Twisters." (Photo courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures; Amblin Entertainment).
For much of its first hour, “Twisters” is typical summer filler, wearing its perfunctory, middle-of-the-road determination to avoid messing with a tried and true formula like a badge of honor. And then Edgar-Jones and Powell begin acting out their rivals-to-allies story arc, and the movie finally clicks. Remember the experiment that Kate wanted to try out on the day her life changed? Chung and Smith run with that, effectively turning the movie into a disaster movie for science nerds. The inclusion of a considerable amount of jargon makes you feel like you're at a science museum, but the characters' fun side starts coming out, it never quite feels like eating your veggies.
Chung, whose Oscar-winning immigrant domestic drama “Minari” put him on the map, is not always able to hit that sweet spot between spectacle, battle of the sexes and character introspection, but he manages to bring these elements together in winning fashion as the movie progresses. “Twisters” hits the expected story beats, but it also makes you invested in the opposites-attract frisson between Kate and Tyler. Edgar-Jones, whom you may have seen in the Hulu series “Normal People,” and Powell, currently carving a niche as a Tinseltown Ken doll who's also equally adept at playing the boy next door and a jerk, succeed in making “Twisters” resemble a romantic dramedy with tornado strikes. (The esteemed Maura Tierney also helps keep things down to earth as Kate's mom.)
Maika Monroe as Agent Lee Harker in a scene from "Longlegs." (Photo courtesy of NEON).
This is a good thing, because the special effects on display are really not that special. De Bont has boasted that relying on practical effects made “Twister” stand out, and he's not wrong, especially when comparing the nearly three-decade-old effects work with “Twisters'” mostly competent but unremarkable CGI that gets the job done here without making much of an impression, Much more accomplished is the new film's sound mix, which makes viewers feel like they're right next to the characters as they try to avoid becoming another statistic in a disaster movie that's too timid to exact a high body count.
But “Twisters” also anchors the action, though one could argue there's not enough of it, with recognizable human behavior, at least once the plot implausibilities subside. Chung has crafted a mixed bag held aloft by old-fashioned star quality and a genuine interest in what makes those violent whirlwinds whirl.
“Longlegs”: The latest chiller from writer-director Osgood Perkins (“The Blackcoat's Daughter”) has a forensic file's worth of virtues working in its favor, including an unhinged Nicolas Cage as the titular boogeyman linked to a series of grisly murders that claimed entire families across two decades. But the filmmaker, who is the son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, wants this to be more than a serial killer chronicle in the tradition of “The Silence of the Lambs,” with which it shares not only narrative ties but a 1990s setting.
Blair Underwood as Agent Carter in a scene from "Longlegs." (Photo courtesy of NEON).
Ambition and willingness to break from norm are all good when it comes to crafting a policier with more than police work on its mind, but Perkins' penchant for the disquieting and sinister takes his film in a direction that ends up feeling strange for strangeness' sake. As viewers who take the plunge will find out, comparisons to Jonathan Demme's Best Picture Oscar winner only tell half the story.
Our protagonist is not Cage's pale Big Bad Wolf with a dulcet voice and Tiny Tim mop of hair, but Lee Harker (“It Follows'” Maika Monroe), the Oregon-based rookie FBI agent who lands the Longlegs case after her superiors learn she has a sixth sense when it comes to finding people who don't necessarily want to be found. “Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all,” observes her supervisor, Agent Carter (a solid Blair Underwood), and the game is afoot.
Nicolas Cage as Longlegs and Maika Monroe as Agent Lee Harker in a scene from "Longlegs." (Photo courtesy of NEON).
Initially, Perkins' widescreen compositions sustain an unsettling atmosphere that enhances a complex investigation with echoes of David Fincher's “Seven” and “Zodiac.” Ah, but the movie also wants to be creepy in a way that channels supernatural horror classics of past decades, and this is when problems arise, for the characters and the movie. The seemingly compatible melding of two genres increasingly feels like a head-on collision, and “Longlegs” becomes more and more silly, as it shifts from the gravity of a murder investigation to the hallucinatory dream logic of a Gothic fairy tale.
To pull off such a tonal shift requires a sure hand, one that's subtle enough to make the switch without viewers even realizing that the ground below them is giving way. And Perkins, who has displayed considerable skill working in horror, doesn't have the chops to pull it off. “Longlegs” chokes on portent, overly enamored of its dread-inducing imagery. You get the sense Perkins is dead set on preventing something as negligible as his narrative from getting in the way of a cool shot. (To say there is wide angle lens abuse is an understatement.) It just stops being scary and starts coming across as overstylized posturing.
Few things are as heartbreaking as witnessing a movie that has so much going for it completely disintegrate in a morass of poor creative decisions and a resolution that whittles down this dark bedtime story to a climactic confrontation that feels both preordained and underimagined. But hey, at least Cage is having the time of his life. His performance -- disturbing but also fun, goofy, even sweet-natured -- is among the few elements that emerge unscathed from this overdeliberate underachiever.
Maika Monroe as Agent Lee Harker in a scene from "Longlegs." (Photo courtesy of NEON).
“Twisters” is now showing across South Florida in wide release, including IMAX engagements at Regal South Beach, AMC Aventura, AMC Sunset Place, CMX Cinemas Dolphin 19 and the AutoNation IMAX at the Museum of Discovery and Science in downtown Fort Lauderdale. “Longlegs” is also showing in wide release, including at Regal South Beach, Silverspot Cinema in downtown Miami, CMX Brickell City Centre and Cinépolis in Coconut Grove.
