Goddawful, save for the winning Glen Powell and the fact I saw it in 4D, so the chairs moved and rumbled, wind blew on us, and lightning flashed in the theater.

Sensurround updated!

Otherwise, a complete dung heap.

Our story begins in Oklahoma, with one set of DEI/ChatGPT generated, wisecracking, riffing storm chasers, led by the charmless Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing). Their endeavor feels like a Mentos commercial, until catastrophe strikes, and then it feels more like a darker Skittles commercial.

Five years later, after Daisy has run away from her fears to New York City, she is drawn back home, because, well … she’s a tornado whisperer. She can scan the topography, watch the wind disassemble a dandelion, take a deep breath, and she just knows where that pesky sky is gonna’ funnel.

Soon, she runs into Powell, a YouTube sensation who chases, or “wrangles,” tornados for fame and followers. Daisy must overcome her fears. Glen will help.

She also confronts the laziest form of corporate skullduggery one can imagine (so thin it is dropped immediately).

The script is banal and nonsensical. There really is nothing to say other than, “whoa!” given the impressive CGI and pyrotechnics (though someone does say, “be careful out there” – ugh), so you wait on some solid jokes and clever banter to get you to the next tornado, maybe some insight into other characters beyond “quirky” and “loud” and “ostentatiously, individualistically hip.”

Not gonna’ happen. Sure, there are a few spots for Powell to shine. But otherwise, he too has a coterie of kooky storm chasers, and they too look and speak like they’ve been assembled by a DEI/ChatGPT witch doctor, and while they all say “whoa!” differently, they don’t say it in a funny or interesting way (SPOILER – not a one of these wafer thin “characters” dies, which is a huge disappointment).

Powell pretty much has to steer this leaden ship with his impressive charm. God knows he tries, but he is thwarted by his co-star and a script written for dimwits.

Edgar-Jones has two faces – sad and sadder. So, for a rollicking, high octane joyride, one of your hosts is on thorazine, and Powell just can’t get past, into, or through her innate dullness.

And when they bond, there is nothing for them to chew on.  Case in point,  They are at a rodeo. Glen thinks Daisy is from New York City originally, so he is showing her the sights. There is great potential for some fun to be had here, the girl who knows the rodeo like the back of her hand letting the cowboy puff out his chest and wax poetically. But no. The kicker is she gets to say, mournfully, that this is not her first rodeo.

Then they talk about their first tornados. Again, this doesn’t have to be Oscar-worthy, but you can have a decent sexual double entendre or two here. God, anything to break up the verbal monotony. But Daisy demurs, Powell tells a story of how he saw one when he was 8 and realized he was supposed to be scared, she asks if he was scared, and he says . . . “yes.”

This is unintentionally moronic dialogue better suited to Idiocracy. Or Quest for Fire.   

As badly abused as the audience may have been, the people of Oklahoma are sitting on a winning class action suit for defamation. Here they are, living in a hellscape where tornados appear in an instant and ravage their communities. It’s all over the news! But damn if they don’t insist on proceeding with the town fair or the Little League playoffs or the Annual Pie-Eating Contest or running lightweight old-timey trolley cars down their streets.

Those plucky Okies won’t be dictated to by mere weather!

Yet, when the tornados arrive, you’d think these weathered veterans were from New Hampshire. They run around screaming and trying to gather belongings, hiding under metal containers, holding knives and bags of broken glass, doing all the other things people in tornados are advised not to do, until Daisy and Glen show up to remind them to seek shelter.

In a movie theater.

That is playing Frankenstein.

Because they don’t get first run movies in Oklahoma.

They do get a shitty country song about how you can’t spell Oklahoma without “home” and there’s a lot more of those ditties throughout this dog.

Gonna’ have to give a second look at Sharknado after this turd.