Daisy Edgar-Jones

Twisters

17/07/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

If ever I were asked to compile a list of the least eagerly anticipated movie sequels, Twisters would figure fairly high on it. After all, though Jan De Bont’s original was a commercial hit back in 1996, it has receded from public consciousness. The only image I can recall from it is a sequence featuring an airborne cow. But Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel has been co-financed by no less than three big studios and is executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, so clearly somebody has high expectations of it.

Twisters stars Daisy Edgar Jones as Kate Carter, an impetuous young meteorologist with the uncanny ability to ‘sniff out’ tornadoes before they actually happen. (Yes, really.) Along with boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack) and a bunch of enthusiastic friends, including Javi (Anthony Ramos), she drives around Oklahoma in a ramshackle truck, chasing twisters – not for kicks, but to collect data for her PhD project.

Which is all great fun, until something bad happens.

Five years later, she’s working in an office in New York, wearing a sensible suit and being very risk averse. She’s approached by Javi, who has recently been in the military and now has access to some state-of-the-art tech which will allow him to capture tornado data as it’s never been done before. Would Kate like to spend a week with him, helping him reap the whirlwind? Pretty soon, she’s back in action and running with a whole crowd of action-seekers, including Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a redneck heartthrob with a huge online following and T-shirt sales to go with it. As he is fond of saying, “You don’t chase your dreams, you ride them.” Inevitably Kate and Glen find themselves bumping up against each other and, equally inevitably, sparks begin to fly…

Essentially, Twisters is a big-budget action romp, with a massive special effects budget, some eye-popping cinematography courtesy of Dan Mindel and, if I’m honest, not a great deal else. It’s a series of thrills and spills, featuring people who survive and others who do not. Every so often characters mumble stuff about the different chemicals that they’re pumping into the tornadoes in an apparent attempt to er… snuff them out? At least, I think that’s what they’re trying to do. I’m not sure how much scrutiny the technical side of this film can withstand.

Really, it’s just an excuse to throw people into a series of action set-pieces and make an audience worry about what’s going to happen to them. Since the unfortunate victims who lose the gamble are whisked away in an instant, there’s are no horribly mangled corpses to bother the 12A certificate. And, unlike its predecessor, Twisters does at least have the honesty to address the destructive nature of storms. Yes, there’s the occasional grudging references to global warming and climate catastrophe, but it all feels a little disingenuous.

There’s also a ‘will they won’t they?’ question overhanging Kate and Tyler throughout proceedings but, rather like those storm-related deaths, it’s all kept offscreen. Nothing to frighten the horses.

Don’t get me wrong, this all makes for an entertaining couple of hours in the cinema, but when you consider that Lee Isaac Chung’s last film was the brilliant and heartwarming Minari, it’s hard to get too excited about a summer blockbuster, which is full of sound and fury and… well, you know the rest.

3.2 stars

Philip Caveney

Where the Crawdads Sing

23/07/22

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Delia Owens’ blockbuster novel Where the Crawdads Sing makes the transition into film, thanks to Reece Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. I’ve never read the book but it’s probably just as well. The fact that it’s sold twelve million copies worldwide would make anything I have to say about it sound suspiciously like sour grapes. Suffice to say, I really hope it’s more convincing than the film.

This is the story of Kya Clark, a little girl living with her family in a remote shack, deep in the marshes of North Carolina. Kya’s Pa (Garret Dillahunt) is a violent drunk, a man so odious that first his wife leaves him, then his two daughters, then his son. None of them bothers to take poor little Kya, so she has to look after him on her own (thanks, guys!) Then Pa abandons Kya and she is obliged to fend for herself, grubbing a living by digging up mussels and selling them to the nice couple who run the local store. She tries a day in school, but is subjected to so much sniggering and cruelty from the other pupils that she runs home and never goes back. Somehow she manages to evade the authorities for… well, years. Mind you, this is the 1960s. It was a different time.

Quite how grubby little Kya metamorphoses into the impeccably turned-out Daisy Edgar-Jones is only one of the many mysteries here, but perhaps it’s something to do with washing your hair in swamp water. Eventually, Kya has a romantic dalliance with ‘nice’ Tate (Taylor John Smith) who teaches her to read (apparently in a matter of weeks). Then, when Tate heads off to college, she hooks up with the rather less cuddly, Chase (Harris Dickinson), who seems to be on a mission to be even more toxic than Kya’s Pa. We know from the film’s opening that Chase has ended up dead at the bottom of a lookout tower and that Kya is on trial for his murder. Luckily, she has the help of ‘nice’ lawyer Tom Milton (David Strathairn), who has come out of retirement in order to defend her…

If I’m making this sound unbelievable that’s because it really is – and it doesn’t help that its all painted in such broad brush strokes that nuance doesn’t get a look in. The people are overblown caricatures and the eyebrow-raising events just keep right on coming. Kya, it turns out, has the ability to draw and paint like a pro (without any formal training) and her very first submission to a publisher results in a life-changing publishing deal! Yeah, right. Apparently, there’s a massive demand for a book about swamp shells.

Edgar-Jones does the best she can with the thankless lead role, but she struggles as her character progresses through a series of dull events, which have the eerie ability to make a two-hour movie feel more like three. It’s not just me. The audience starts filtering out long before the final scene but I stick resolutely in my seat to see the film’s final – heavily-signposted – ‘twist’.

Of course, crawdads can’t actually sing, so Taylor Swift steps in with a specially-written ballad over the credits. Which is arguably the best thing here, but it’s a very low bar. Those who enjoyed the book might want to give this a go, but be warned: it’s underwhelming to say the least.

2.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Fresh

17/06/22

Disney+

I have high hopes of this comedy-horror, where the feminist sub-text is right there on the surface. It promises to be a ‘fresh’ take on a well-worn trope, written and directed by two women (Lauryn Kahn and Mimi Cave respectively). So imagine my disappointment when I find myself watching an all-too familiar extended sequence: a beautiful young woman chained up in a cruel madman’s basement, crying and begging for her freedom. Surely I can’t be alone in thinking that it’s not enough to subvert the ending (spoiler: it’s not a man who saves the day)? That, actually, you can’t make a valid point about the exploitation of women by exploiting them further? Or that a film that lingers unironically on images of women’s suffering loses its claim to be a fucking comedy?

It starts off promisingly. Okay, so it’s not exactly subtle. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is single and sick of the dating scene. We see her out with a cartoonish man, all wafting scarf and pronouncements about how women just aren’t as feminine as they used to be. It’s mildly amusing: recognisably awful, but also (whisper) a bit hack. Later, she texts another guy, who immediately sends her a dick pic. Maybe love just isn’t for her, she tells her best pal, Mollie (Jojo T Gibbs). But then she meets Steve (Sebastian Stan), who seems too good to be true. He’s sweet, polite, engaging, kind.

And yeah, too good to be true. Because Steve is a cannibal, who butchers women. It’s an obvious metaphor for the romance meat market – and, sadly, the film’s charm wears off as quickly as Steve’s. The lengthy pre-credit sequence hints at something gentle and quirky; what follows is almost gore-by-numbers, albeit with some gorgeous cinematography (by Pawel Pogorzelski) and a banging 80s soundtrack.

Ach, I don’t know. It makes me weary. I hated rape-revenge movies The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Elle for the same reason: I don’t want to watch women being victimised, and then emerging, brutalised, to re-enact the same violence against men. That’s not redemption; it’s having your steak and eating it: a tone-deaf definition of a ‘strong woman’ – and we shouldn’t let the film-makers off the hook. Emerald Fennell nails feminist vengeance in Promising Young Woman, proving it can be done.

That’s not to say there’s nothing good about this film. The actors are all impressive, although Gibbs is criminally under-used as Mollie (of course she is, because Mollie is black and gay, only ever destined for a sidekick role alongside the straight, white heroine). I like the device of setting up Paul (Dayo Okeniyi) as a potential hero, and then deflating that hope. Stan is well-cast as the killer, plausibly likeable, so that his success in charming Noa seems credible enough. The initial meat-packing sequences are wonderfully stylised, hinting at the better movie this could have been.

In many ways, the whole thing works better as an analogy for farming, where animals live in captivity, and where ‘kindness’ only extends as far as keeping them warm and fed so that they’re tender and disease-free when we come to eat them. That’s not the intended message, but it’s the one I’m taking home.

This movie just doesn’t work for me: the ‘comedy’ never raises more than a small smile, and the ‘horror’ is nasty rather than scary. Sadly, in the end, Fresh is more than a little bit stale.

2.2 stars

Susan Singfield