LET'S TWIST AGAIN...

Opening this weekend...

Twisters--This isn't a look behind the scenes at the raw, fiercely competitive world of people who play the Milton Bradley party game. No, this is a pretty belated sequel to Jan de Bont's Twister, the 1996 adventure yarn about storm chasers. It follows roughly the same plot template: A midwestern heroine with a personal grudge against tornados tries to devise a way to combat them. In '96 this role was played by Helen Hunt; here it's a waif called Daisy Edgar-Jones.

After an opening tragedy while she's trying to deploy the "Dorothy" technology from the original film, our meteorologist heroine withdraws to New York. Five years later she's tempted back into storm chasing in her home state of Oklahoma by an old crony (Anthony Ramos) with new high-tech charting equipment and a crew and budget. He wants her tornado whisperer skills in helping them get close enough to get the essential data to figure out how to dissipate a tornado in progress. She reluctantly agrees to join them for a week.

She and her new colleagues finds themselves in competition with a rowdy, showboating band of YouTube storm chasers, led by the cute, cocksure cowboy Glen Powell. They look like insufferable clowns, but as our heroine trades banter with him and gradually gets to know him better, and to learn more about his motives...Well, you can forecast where this is heading.

I guess I wasn't aware that Twister, which also starred Bill Paxton and Jami Gertz, was such a beloved film that there was a burning desire for a sequel. I remember thinking it was okay, if a little CGI-ersatz, and that the "bad" meteorologist in the black SUV played by Cary Elwes was a little corny. I enjoyed it, but certainly didn't feel any great need for another chapter.

The new film, directed by Minari's Lee Isaac Chung from a script by Mark L. Smith, has the same merits as the original, and the same weaknesses. The storms and the destruction they wreak have the sterile, unreal quality of wall-to-wall CGI effects. I'm not sure what the alternative would be; it's hardly fair to ask the cast and crew to work with actual twisters. But the tornado that sucked Dorothy up to Oz in 1939 has, for me, more physical menace than the virtual twisters here.

That said, Chung handles the big showpiece action scenes excitingly, and he keeps them coming. Edgar-Jones, Powell, Ramos and the other actors are amiable enough, though the dramatic and romantic side of the film isn't much more substantive than that of, say, a Hallmark holiday movie--Powell looks like he'd be a natural for those.

All throughout Twisters, it's continually exasperating to see that, in the midst of what we're told is a record-setting tornado outbreak, the small-town Okies are still going to rodeos and street fairs and baseball games. At one point our heroes even seek shelter from the storm in a movie theater which, this being a Universal picture, is showing the original 1931 Frankenstein. If they must get flattened in a theater, at least they get a worthwhile flick.