People are desperate to see things move on-screen in this cinematically torpid summer of 2024. Luckily, tornadoes move with a wild, swirling rush, sucking up people and cars and chunks of buildings and everything else as they go, propelling it all into violent motion too. So Twisters is a big hit.

It does everything you’d expect of the sequel to 1996’s Twister. Even more tornadoes have been added to the narrative this go-around, churning relentlessly down “Tornado Alley” in Oklahoma, pursued by fanatical storm chasers. Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) is perfectly competent in framing this kind of action, which is all he needs to be in order to succeed.

Without ever mentioning the words “climate change,” the by-the-numbers script written by Mark L. Smith (The Boys in the Boat, The Revenant) from a story by Joseph Kosinski (director of Top Gun: Maverick) makes clear that ever more “extreme weather” is causing this phenomenon. So extreme is this weather that the last tornado portrayed in the film is an evil tornado, dark and smoldering satanically as it builds in malevolent strength, intent on massive human casualties.

But even the non-satanic tornadoes are plenty dangerous enough. There’s a fatal storm chase in the film’s opening, just to reassure the viewer that there’ll be plenty of natural disaster action. This sequence finds young Oklahoman meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) dashing out eagerly to test her theory about how to make a tornado collapse before it hits a town. She’s with her stupendously handsome boyfriend (Daryl McCormack) and three friends. But the test run fails, with deadly consequences, and Kate is destined for years of guilt-ridden escape from the memory of those she lost that day.

Later we see her living in New York City, working for the National Weather Service in a safe office job, when old friend and fellow survivor Javi (Anthony Ramos) shows up on a bankrolled project to collect 3D data on tornadoes. He needs Kate’s uncanny tornado-whisperer ability to predict where tornadoes will form and what they’ll do once they’re on the move. She reluctantly agrees to return to Oklahoma, the scene of her trauma.

There she finds she’s part of a corporate team of smug scientists, all wearing identical white polo shirts with the company logo on them, which also appears on the white vans they drive. So we know these aren’t the good guys. But the only alternative in the storm-chasing line is the bunch of howling yahoos who comprise the local contingent.

Remember the idiots who went out in boats, throwing chum in the water, hoping to attract the gigantic killer shark in the greatest of all summer movies, Jaws? It’s like being asked to root for them.

The worst of the yahoo lot is the strutting Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his motley crew of renegade enthusiasts, sporting cowboy hats and dirty Wrangler jeans and shitkicker boots. They have a million followers on YouTube and sell T-shirts with Tyler’s grinning face on them that feature the slogan “Not My First Tornado.”

They call themselves “tornado wranglers,” and they pull moronic stunts like driving directly into raging storm centers, using drilling devices to dig down into the hard earth to secure their tricked-out pickup truck to the ground while they conduct experiments on whether or not you can shoot fireworks up into the middle of a tornado.

When they do this, you might ask, why don’t all the windows on the pickup truck shatter while its metal structure gets twisted and torn to pieces and the dumb hot dogs inside are sucked up into the roaring spiral, whether whole or in parts? After all, other scenes in the movie show entire buildings, which are definitely secured to the ground, getting pulled up by cyclonic forces, and people are urged not to shelter in their cars, which are completely inadequate for that purpose.

Still, realism is hardly the goal here, and we’re left to assume that these wranglers are just so cool that tornadoes can’t hurt them or their vehicles. It’s not an unusual assumption in action-oriented films, the untouchability of the heroes. And it seems these douchebags really are the heroes.

Of course, Kate, an intellectual, despises them initially, especially Tyler, in conventional rom-com fashion. But she’s gradually won over by what turns out to be their superior ethics, as they rush to help devastated townspeople left in the wake of the same tornadoes the wranglers have been chasing for the thrill of it. It turns out they sell all those T-shirts just to raise money to feed the suffering survivors.

Meanwhile, the corporate team is revealed to be involved in a nasty partnership with local realtors to use the devastation as an excuse to buy up land cheap when it’s sold by desperate former homeowners.

Kate and Javi join Tyler’s do-gooders in the most maddening scene in the movie, in which they walk through a demolished town doing nothing for anybody but gesturing vaguely toward shell-shocked citizens, saying, “I just wish we could do more for these people.”

Here’s the thing — when you’re doing nothing, you can always do more.

Still, it must be admitted that new star Glen Powell is charismatic enough to sell his Tyler character, this proudly silly hayseed adrenaline junkie who, it turns out, is really a highly educated and saintly fellow under his obnoxious Stetson. Transforming an abrasive jackass into a dreamboat midway through the narrative has been a problem faced by every romance writer or director since Jane Austen turned Mr Darcy from detestable to divine, and this is no exception.

And it’s hardly a new difficulty in American fictional entertainment, the way protagonists and their sidekicks and love interests are often barely endurable, but still you’re shoved toward identifying with somebody. It can be tough, especially if there’s no dazzling villain you can love. (I was kind of partial to the evil tornado.) As Mark Twain described it in his sublime essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” this experience entails wishing the characters “would all get drowned together.”

But it sometimes happens that an actor or two can partially salvage the situation.

Powell is one of these. He just seems so happy to be a star, and he regards his female leads with such smiling affection that it’s no wonder he suddenly seems ubiquitous after three hit films in a row this year: Anyone but You, Hit Man, and Twisters. He’s the one who enlivens the rote romance in Twisters, while Daisy Edgar-Jones seems stuck in a rather one-note portrayal of round-eyed solemnity.

There’s another standout, a mysteriously good performance in the middle of the film by Maura Tierney. It’s so good it’s distracting. She plays Kate’s salt-of-the-earth mother, Cathy Carter, a small-scale farmer presumably distressed that she hasn’t seen her troubled daughter in years. But she maintains a pleasingly unfazed manner of flinty competence, humor, and loving generosity when Kate shows up unexpectedly with Tyler not far behind. It’s as if Cathy’s been working with animals so long that she can’t be thrown by erratic behavior, even of the self-sabotaging human kind.

Anyway, you know without being told whether you’d like to see CGI tornadoes wreaking havoc all over Oklahoma, pursued by the people who love them. But even if you’re bent on seeing Twisters, be warned — there’s a whole lot of contemporary country music yeehawing along with director Chung’s handsome 35 mm imagery. Be sure to factor that into your moviegoing considerations.