A stupendously inferior standalone sequel to a timeless Amblin blockbuster swirls around Jack Black and Will Smith on streaming

When we hear a film get described with the word “Amblin,” the first thing that springs to mind is a xerox of a group of plucky children going on a rollicking adventure through space, time, a lost world, or any other fantastical biome of your choosing. We have Goonies and Gremlins to thank for that Pavlovian response.

But really, the Spielbergian production company’s bread and butter is, of course, Spielbergian blockbusters, from Jurassic Park and its waning successors, to Ready Player One, all the way to the Men in Black films. The company’s latest such effort is Twisters, the standalone sequel to the Michael Crichton-penned film Twister, and while it fell considerably short of suring the 1996 original, that was never going to stop it from clocking the highest wind speeds on streaming.

Per FlixPatrol, Twisters has blown all the way to the top of the worldwide Max film charts at the time of writing, suring the likes of fellow 2024 summer blockbuster Bad Boys: Ride or Die in 10th place, and fellow Universal release Kung Fu Panda 4 in third place.

The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Carter, a PhD candidate hoping to use her knowledge and inventions to help combat the threat of tornados, and who’s recruited by her friend, former stormchaser, and tornado radar jockey Javi (Anthony Ramos) to test his company’s new equipment. They arrive in Oklahoma for the test, and are accosted by celebrity stormchaser Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his crew, and the two groups find themselves side-by-side as they run headlong into severe danger, harboring complex motives that will soon unfurl in a big way.

The Lee Isaac Chung-directed sequel isn’t a bad film by any stretch, but even without comparing it to Twister, it’s fairly obvious that this film is one of the far weaker versions of itself. It seems to believe that it can achieve spectacle simply by having such events be part of the plot, but the camera rarely has any interest in capturing or contributing to it, and so most of these attempts are ultimately undermined.

Indeed, scope-sensitive framing of the destruction is shuffled to the side for shaky shots of people running, things breaking, and more things blowing away. Flat characters and flatter dialogue only serve to drag the proceedings down even further, and if it weren’t for Glen Powell breathing both an entertaining and thematically-rich life into Tyler Owens, Twisters could have been a Category 5 faceplant.

Contrast this with the original film, which not only takes a keen interest in the presentation of its spectacle, but renders its characters with playful care prior to doing so. These characters bicker good-naturedly, quip, take the piss out of each other, and generally make an effort to have meaningful and unique relationships between each other. The love story between Jo and Bill (played by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton) even manages to be genuinely solid when it didn’t have to be, which is perhaps a testament to the above-and-beyond love and care that went into Twister as a whole, as well as the relative lack of it in the sequel.