About three quarters of the way through Into the Storm, a homage is paid to the movie Twister when you very briefly see a cow being carried away by a tornado, thus mimicking the most famous scene in the 1996 storm chasing movie. As nice as that moment is, it also serves to underline how much better Twister is than this new effort which is now in cinemas.
Twister featured a decent script and was boosted by the presence of top notch actors such as Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Into the Storm does not have that advantage. The opening twenty minutes or so establishing the characters is pretty painful to watch. The characters – whining high school students, brain dead thrill seeking rednecks, and a documentary film crew are pretty clichéd, and the actors are struggling with a lame script. The conceit of having students compiling time capsule videos, thus giving them the excuse to have cameras running all the time is a little irritating.
Fortunately, once the action kicks in, things improve a lot. There are some terrific set pieces at a school and in the centre of the town that the film is set in. The tornadoes are brilliantly realised, and watching this on a big screen it really feels that you are in the centre of the storm. You even forget that you don’t really care about the characters as the last hour of the overall zippy 89 minutes rattles along. Given the short running time, it does feel like there was quite a lot of story edited out. Whilst that keeps the film moving, it does result in odd sequences such as a sudden appearance of a fleet of buses to evacuate people from the school, and one of the storm chasers disappearing from large chunks of the story!
The only performance worthy of a positive mention is Matt Walsh as the arrogant film maker, with Richard Armitage and Sarah Wayne Callies faring particularly badly. The director, Steven Quale though, in only his second attempt at helming a movie shows that he can handle action really well, and I imagine he will be in line for some more major blockbusters in the near future.
If you can make it through the establishing scenes you should find enough to entertain you…
Rating: 6 out of 10