Twisters ★★★☆☆

Another reboot! The original Twister, released in 1996, was an enjoyable but forgettable adventure starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt as a divorcing pair of tornado-chasers who realise that they didn’t need to split up, just get stuck inside a hurricane. This, like a lot of reboots, is essentially the same, but with better special effects and younger, hotter actors.

In the lead is Daisy Edgar-Jones, familiar to British audiences from the TV series Normal People. She plays Kate, a meteorologist with an instinct for hurricane behaviour, but who has quit the chasing game after an evil hurricane killed all her friends. Lured back into the field for one last job, she meets Tyler Owens, a bad boy YouTuber who leads a rag-tag gang who make a living filming themselves hunting storms. He’s played by Glen Powell, whom you might remember from his role as a bad boy fighter pilot in the Top Gun reboot. Will these two people who are easily 50 per cent more beautiful than anyone else in the movie hook up? I won’t spoil the ending for you, but Kate learns that beneath Tyler’s hunky cowboy wildman exterior, there are hidden depths. Does Tyler learn anything? Not noticeably.

To be honest, the story is really a vehicle for a series of terrific special effects sequences, as our gorgeous heroes alternately chase and flee the weather. All of these are as good as you expect, with cars and people ripped up into the air and tossed across the landscape. The film does a good job of making mundane objects terrifying by hurling them towards the camera at a hundred miles an hour. Comic relief is provided by a British journalist who apparently works for a magazine that has the budget to send him on assignment for weeks on end. And if you think that sounds implausible, the credits deliver a laugh-out-loud moment when they reveal the character rejoices in the completely normal English name of “Benjamin Shropshire III”.

The plot difficulty is films like this is that weather doesn’t really work as a villain, and so we’re given some corporate storm chasers, working on a technology that will help them understand tornados better. It turns out they’re doing this at the behest of a property developer who buys places up after they’ve been destroyed. This, sadly, makes no sense. The crucial bit of his business model is arriving in places that hurricanes have already been to, and these, it is made clear to us, are not hard to identify. It’s never explained why he would want to spend millions of dollars predicting where they’re going to go next. Baddies gonna bad, I guess.

But who are we to quibble when beautiful people and special effects budgets have been put on screen for our pleasure? It’s a summer movie: a fun but forgettable couple of hours.