Twisters: Prepare to be blown away!

Twisters (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for intense action and peril, fleeting profanity, and disturbing images

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.21.24

Although this film leaves no doubt that it’s a summertime, popcorn-laden rollercoaster ride — and quite a suspenseful one — there’s no denying the cautionary message also embedded in Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski’s storyline:

 

With an EF5 (Enhanced Fujita Scale) tornado about to blow into town, Kate (Daisy
Edger-Jones), Ravi (Anthony Ramos, center) and Tyler (Glen Powell) try to determine
the safest place to hunker down.

Climate change is real, and those who ignore Mother Nature’s increasingly catastrophic warnings, do so at their own peril.

Because, as this thriller distressingly depicts, there will come a time when the financial damage, and tragic loss of life, become too great to dismiss.

 

(I’d have thought this was blindingly obvious years ago ... but certain segments of humanity do have a distressing habit of burying their heads in the sand.)

 

Anyway...

 

This sequel’s power comes not merely from special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher and visual effects supervisor Ben Snow’s awesome action sequences, but also the crucial attention paid to characters and their interactions. That’s no surprise; director Lee Isaac Chung earned two well-deserved Academy Awards nominations for 2020’s Minari — easily one of this decade’s most sensitively emotional dramas — and he also helmed a 2023 episode of television’s The Mandalorian, which likely served as a testing ground for this big-screen feature.

 

Let it be said: Chung and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire move things along at a breakneck pace.

 

But as always is the case with such films, the best ones succeed because we grow to admire and care about the people involved. That’s definitely true here, since the viewers at Tuesday evening’s sold-out preview screening were riveted, worried and at the edge of their seats, during this saga’s ferocious climax.

 

But that comes later.

 

A prologue finds Muskogee State University graduate student Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) heading into Oklahoma’s “Tornado Alley,” in order to test a theoretical chemical invention that she believes could squelch small twisters, before they become larger monsters. Their team includes Kate’s boyfriend, Jeb (Daryl McCormack), and students Addy (Kiernan Shipka) and Praveen (Nik Dodani, recognized from his supporting role on the Netflix series Atypical).

 

(In a nice touch of continuity, Muskogee State was the alma mater of the characters played by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, in 1996’s Twister. Indeed, that film’s writers — Anne-Marie Martin and the late Michael Crichton — are granted credits here.)

 

Alas, the experiment ends in tragedy.

Nope: My sentiments precisely

Nope (2022) • View trailer

No stars (turkey). Rated R, for bloody violence and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.22.22

Jordan Peele, who won a well-deserved writing Oscar for his breakthrough hit — 2018’s Get Out — has succumbed to the M. Night Shyamalan curse.

 

Each new film tries harder, yet achieves less.

 

Having learned enough to realize that they're dealing with something quite nasty, our
heroes — from left, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald (Keke Palmer) and Angel
(Brandon Perea) can't imagine what to do next.

In this case, much less.

Nope — a terrible title, just in passing — obviously began life as a 10-word elevator pitch (which I cannot speculate upon, due to spoilers). It might have turned into a decently chilling 20-minute short, but as a 135-minute vanity flop, the result is a dull, interminable slog.

 

Ten minutes into this bomb, it’s blindingly obvious that we’re dealing with a world-class stinker. And it doesn’t get any better. Worse, in fact.

 

Following two brief prologues — I’ll dial back to those in a moment — we meet siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), who are struggling to maintain the legacy of their father’s specialty horse ranch, which provides animals for Hollywood shoots, theme parks and the like. Their operation, located in the isolated Agua Dulce desert in northern Los Angeles County, hangs by a thread.

 

OJ is expressionless and taciturn to the point of somnambulance, throughout this entire story; he makes Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” — back in that actor’s 1960s spaghetti western days — look and sound Shakespearean. It takes genuine talent to guide an actor with Kaluuya’s significant chops into such a relentlessly dull and lackluster performance, but Peele — who wrote, directed and produced this turkey — somehow managed.

 

Emerald, in contrast, is shrill, profane, insolent, mean-spirited and — in short — absolutely intolerable. Palmer behaves as if she’s revved up on cocaine the entire time; her performance is unrestrained, unintelligible and unlikable. We loathe her character on sight, and Palmer isn’t helped by the stream-of-consciousness babble that Peele apparently believes passes for dialogue.

 

Rarely have two movie characters so effectively — and so quickly — turned an audience off. The very thought of spending more than two hours with them is unbearable.

 

First, though, we endure the travesty of prologue No. 1, as a TV family sitcom shoot goes awry when its star — a chimpanzee — suddenly attacks his human co-stars in a gory swath of blood-laden rage.

 

The notion that any filmmaker would be insensitive enough to mount such a tasteless spectacle — in our more enlightened, post-Jane Goodall era — is utterly appalling. It’s also an indication of unrestrained arrogance on Peele’s part, particularly since it adds nothing to his film.