Herr Machine Presents! Classic Reviews: Twister

If I'm just being honest, I can't help but think that's a pretty damn cool poster. It's dark and spooky, the color palette calling to mind more supernatural thrillers. The text is more than appropriate and you can't help but wonder if this movie is going to be played as more of a horror film.

But this isn't a review of the poster, this is a review of the movie, Twister.

The story goes like this: Professional Storm Puncher Bill Harding (the ever-boring Bill Paxton) is all done with excitement. He wants to sell out (?) and become a weather man. He needs to get his divorce with fellow Storm Puncher Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) finalized so that he can marry some lady whose name I don't remember. Through a series of wacky shenanigans, Bill and Jo end up on the trail of a bunch of tornadoes on Tornado Day, trying to launch a bunch of science balls into the tornado in the hope of getting long lists of science on their 45-pound laptops.

But wait, there's more! Jo had a traumatic event in her childhood. The F5 Tornado (the most powerful kind of tornado there is), showed up at her house as a child and killed her retarded father, which is okay because he basically ran into the tornado, a trait his daughter shares. We're happy to have a gene pool free from people who run straight at tornadoes with their arms in the air, screaming nonsense in an attempt to scare them off.

But what this means for Jo is she has a personal stake in their battle against the F5, and the F5 has unfinished business with Jo.

But wait, it gets stupider! Since a natural disaster aptly dubbed "the finger of god" wasn't enough of an antagonist, they hired master thespian Cary Elwes to portray villain Jonas. Jonas is a rival Storm Puncher who got himself a bunch of corporate sponsorships so that he could, get this, have state of the art technology to aid him in his quest to learn more about tornadoes! Doesn't it just make you want to vomit? How villainous of him. So basically they paint him as an arrogant prick who's in the Storm Punching business so that he can get piles of money and women will worship the ground he works on, because women fucking love scientists. And men that are Cary Elwes.

For the most part, though, this film is incredibly run-of-the-mill. It's as if they took an action-thriller script, crossed out every time they had written "terrorist" or "Russian" and replaced it with "tornado". Which led to a few interesting shootouts being filmed.

And speaking of the action and excitement, the action and excitement is pretty lame. Well, some of it is all right, but I just couldn't get over one scene. Driving over a lake, Bill and Jo are surrounded by not one, not two, but THREE motherfucking tornadoes. These badass motherfuckers are kicking cows to each other like hackysacks, but when all three converge on their car, they do little more than rock the car back and forth, like someone with above-average lung power is blowing on their car. Oooh, real scary, Jan de Bont. You may as well have called this Gentle Breeze: The Movie.

All the actors (including a pre-fame Phillip Seymour Hoffman being typically the best part of the movie and Jeremy Davies, one of my favorite underused actors) seem to be acting on their lunch break, but I do have something nice to say about Helen Hunt. Every time there's a strong female role, the woman is essentially written as a man (think Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2). For once, there's a female character that's strong and resilient and all that, but retains feminine qualities and can even come off as attractive at times. I think that's more Helen Hunt than the way the character is written, though, because I feel the same way about her in As Good As It Gets. It's nice to see a female character in an action movie that isn't being boned by James Bond and doesn't have a ballsack.

That said, her character IS an idiot, as she aptly demonstrates every time she sees a tornado and tries to get close enough to have a conversation with it.

Whose idea was this movie? I can't decide if it was a brilliant idea that paid off brilliantly, or a stupid idea that the idiots in charge bumbled their way through and ended up with piles of money that they probably spent on ice cream. They try to make a strong case for the movie's importance and dedication to the art of storm chasing, but it's just a hilarious failed attempt at manipulation, with sad piano music and sad families standing by the side of the road, crying because they're sad that the mean tornado kicked their litter of kittens to death. And then there's the scene where Jo's aunt is attacked by the F5, which was preceded by a deleted scene where the tornadoes powwow on top of Mount Olympus and start chanting "Attack her heart! Attack her heart!". It all reeks of that effect that big-budget movies try to have on the popular imagination, where immediately after they see a movie where they make storm chasing to be a thrill-a-minute science-aganza where you save old ladies from their collapsing houses and chase off F5s, everyone is excited about tornadoes and all the little kids buy tornado lunchboxes and tornado action figures.

I can't recommend this movie to anyone outside of stroke victims, but I had a good time watching it with a friend of mine. If this is your kind of thing, you probably know it already, and if it's not, then it's not. It's a mid-90's blockbuster, and those never aged very well, this being no exception.

3/10