Twisters review: 'Glen Powell is a bigger force of nature than any of the tornados tearing across the screen'

Blur: To the End (15) **

Janet Planet (12A) **

Despicable Me 4 (U) **

A sequel in pluralised name only, Twisters takes the basic premise of 1996’s Michael Crichton-penned blockbuster about tornado-chasing mavericks and updates it with a new generation of weather geeks who get their kicks pursuing wind around Oklahoma for scientific and/or YouTube glory. Where the first film was basically a post-Jurassic Park digital effects showcase buttressed by a cast of character actors running through the sort of off-the-shelf human dramas familiar from Steve Spielberg's biggest hits (Spielberg returns as an executive producer), the new one is more of the same, but for one crucial difference: movie star du jour Glen Powell (Hit Man) is a bigger force of nature than any of the tornados tearing across the screen.

It's certainly a pretty dull and formulaic movie before he arrives as a good-ole-boy meteorologist whose rag-tag crew of storm chasers shoot fireworks into tornadoes for social media likes and seem able to monetise their well-funded endeavours by hawking merchandise to an apparent legion of fans. Their entire operation is patently ridiculous, but a lot more fun than watching Daisy Edgar-Jones attempting to navigate her character's residual trauma after her tornado whisperer Cate gets her best friends killed during the doomed weather experiment that opens the movie. Cut to a few years later and Cate is approached by Javi (Anthony Ramos), the one friend who survived her mistake and who wants her to face her fears by helping him spearhead a new military funded operation to track increased storm activity across their old home state.

"It’s a once-in-a-generation tornado event that’s going after the people we love,” he tells Cate, weirdly treating twisters as sentient monsters with vengeance on their minds rather than, say, acknowledging that climate change (two words never uttered in the film) might have something to do with what’s going on. Risible dialogue and dubious character motivation aside, the film gets going when the unimpressed Cate butts heads with Powell’s Owen, setting in motion a literal whirlwind romance (albeit a very chaste one) as they realise their competing approaches are more aligned than they think.

Making the jump from Oscar-winning indie film Minari to brain-off summer blockbuster fare, director Lee Isaac Chung fails to impose much creative vision on proceedings, underutilising the film's supporting cast – among them Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brien and forthcoming Superman star David Corenswet – and struggling to elicit much of a performance from Edgar-Jones, who lacks Powell’s megawatt charisma. But the set-pieces are effectively handled, even if staging the climactic one in a small-town repertory cinema that’s actually open (it’s really a homage to the drive-in scene from the first film) might be the most unbelievable thing in the movie.

Remove the titular colon and Blur: To The End could serve as its own review, so vague and unrevealing is this documentary tracking Damon Albarn and Co’s 2023 reunion to record a new album and play Wembley Stadium for the first time in their storied career. Caught somewhere between a tedious fly-on-the-wall doc (look, there’s Albarn feeding his chickens), an ineffectual promo for recent creative activity (it doesn’t even mention the name of the album they’re in the process of recording), and a piecemeal history of the band (one that steers clear of almost any reference to Britpop), you quickly suspect its opacity might have more to do with director Toby L’s indifference to the process than the band’s reticence to open up (at one point Albarn even chastises him for taking a sabbatical during filming).

The film certainly proves singularly uninterested in offering any historical context that might help explain where Blur came from musically, why they became as big as they did, and how they've managed to keep evolving creatively. It also resists most attempts to probe Albarn, bassist Alex James, guitarist Graham Coxon and drummer Dave Rowntree on difficult subjects, meekly accepting their deflections. The band themselves seem to have morphed into versions of the character Albarn astutely satirised in their Oasis-beating number one single Country House: wealthy, middle-aged, gone-to-seed misanthropes luxuriating in their respective rural retreats unable to figure out why they’re sad.

There’s a lot of that kind of navel-gazing going on in Janet Planet too, New York theatre darling Annie Baker’s aggressively minimalist and self-satisfied debut feature. Revolving around a narcissistic acupuncturist called Janet (Julianne Nicholson), the film follows her as she navigates the summer holidays with her awkward tween daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) after the latter bails early on camp. Structured as a series of prolonged encounters with different interlopers to their implausibly luxurious woodland retreat, the film falls victim to the mimetic fallacy as Baker makes us privy to the tedium of Janet and Lacy’s lives without unlocking anything particularly interesting or profound about either of them.

The latest instalment of the Steve Carell-voiced animated franchise about an aspiring supervillain turned secret agent, Despicable Me 4 (which is actually the sixth instalment if you include the two spin-off Minions films) is yet another example of cinematic barrel scraping. This time Gru has a new addition to his adoptive family, a baby boy with whom he’s struggling to form a the kind of loving bond he craves. It’s a mildly interesting theme, but it swiftly takes a backseat to the franchise’s usual shenanigans as a former nemesis — Will Ferrell’s cockroach/human hybrid Maxime La Mal — vows revenge for past slights. The jokes are pretty weak, but the Minions still raise half-a-smile.

Twisters is in cinemas from 17 July; Blur: To the End and Janet Planet are on selected release from 19 July; Despicable Me 4 is in cinemas now.