Tag: Glen Powell

Twisters (2024)

It won’t blow away, but theres something reassuringly old-fashioned about Twisters

Director: Lee Isaac Chung

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Kate Carter), Glen Powell (Tyler Owens), Anthony Ramos (Javi), Brandon Perea (Boone), Maura Tierney (Cathy Carter), Harry Hadden-Paton (Ben), Sasha Lane (Lily), Daryl McCormack (Jeb), Kiernan Shipka (Addy), Nik Dodani (Praveen), David Corenswet (Scott)

Twisters is perhaps one of the oddest pieces of IP rebooting (as we call it these days) in years: a sideways sequel to a 1996 box-office hit that virtually no one has thought about once since it was in the cinema thirty years ago. Twisters hardly brings in a new breath of air for 2024 compared to what worked at the box-office in 1996: in fact in many ways it’s as predictable as that film was. But yet it gets away with it, because there is an old-fashioned simplicity about it, a pure ‘just wanna entertain you’ vibe throughout, combined with the fact it creates a small group of likeable characters we care about, played by winning performers. Rather like Top Gun: Maverick it takes the ideas that people liked from the first film but delivers them far more effectively with much more charm.

Meteorologist and instinctive twister spotter Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is one of the few survivors of a failed scientific experiment to use a compound foam to reduce the power of tornados, with the deceased including her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack). Five years later she is called back into the field by her old colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) who needs her help to test his new tornado radar-scanning technology company. In Oklahoma with Javi’s team, Kate faces her fears, finds that the impact of the storms is leaving a heavy burden on the community and falls into a flirtation with rock-and-roll meteorologist and YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) whose cowboy exterior hides his heart of gold.

All this blows itself up into highly entertaining stuff, told with an old-fashioned sense of fun by Lee Isaac Chung. It’s actually a relief to find a modern blockbuster just focused on an entertaining, character-led piece of popcorn fun, rather than blowing pop-culture references, set-ups for future films and homages to hits from yesteryear, straight into your eyes. Twisters never reinvents any wheels at all, but it’s several degrees better than the forgotten film its riffing on and you’ll end up being surprisingly invested in it.

A big part of that is the charming and hugely likeable performances from its two leads. Edgar-Jones is very good at this sort of tough-edged exterior hiding inner-vulnerabilities (the team on Twisters must clearly have binged through Normal People during lockdown like the rest of us). Powell – who is having a moment and then-some – is also an absolute pro at cocksure types like this with unexpected layers. There is a sort of It Happened One Night opposites-attract screwball comedy between these two, who take each other at first for a naïve city-girl and a brainless cowboy only to find (would you believe it!) that first impressions are not always the right impressions.

However, this sort of rom-com, relationship-led stuff is exactly what makes Twisters entertaining and makes you care for it. After all, as Twister showed us, once you’ve seen wind related special effects pile on, you’ve kind of seen them all, it’s just a question of degree. Twisters front-and-centres not so much the gusty action, but the characters at the heart of it. Impressive as Chung’s staging of the blowing away of cars and the ripping up of buildings is, it works because we care about the people at cowering beneath the gale.

That’s because Twisters is told with an old-fashioned heart. There is nothing in it that really surprises you: Daryl McCormack’s prologue boyfriend has ‘doomed’ written all over him the moment he speaks and the only thing that you’ll really puzzle over is how long the post-prologue time-jump will be. Although it’s character and plot developments are well handled and endearingly delivered, there are all unsurprising. Would you believe Kate and Tyler find they have much in common? That Tyler’s blow-hard cowboy storm-chasers turn out to all have Hearts of Gold? That Javi’s loaded, Stetson-wearing tycoon sponsor is a ruthless modern-day Crassus, using the weather forecasts to snap up devastated land for tuppence? It’s just like we can be pretty certain that the twister-diluting experiment that Kate is working on in the film’s opening will come storming back in Act Five.

You could pretty much scribble down all possible plot developments over the course of the film after watching the first twenty minutes, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. Even though everything in this is completely and utterly safe and straight-forward, it’s told with such professionalism and such a sense of fun, it hardly matters. Everything in Twisters is focused on just entertaining you and not forcing you to worry or get stressed about things. Perhaps that’s why the film shies away from the questions asked around why the storms are getting worse (let’s not bring something really depressing like climate change into a breezy opposites-attract thrill ride). To balance that it does more-or-less avoid the storms making moral judgements on who gets killed off in its blustery assaults, unlike so many other disaster movies.

Twisters offers nothing really original or unique, but everything in it seems to come from the heart, like Chung wanted to make the sort of unfussy, well-meaning entertainment vehicles he watched in his youth, when it was all about sitting back, munching popcorn and leaving with a grin on your face that a film just entertained you. And at a time when the cinema seems to be full of easter-egg stuffed, self-satisfied, franchise-building bait there is an awful lot to be said for that.

Hit Man (2024)

Inventive, playful, funny, sexy and dark this fabulous dark comedy changes gears with confident ease

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Glen Powell (Gary Johnson), Adria Arjona (Madison Figueroa Masters), Austin Amelio (Jasper), Retta (Claudette), Sanjay Rao (Phil), Molly Bernard (Alicia), Evan Holtzman (Ray Masters)

You might not want to hear it, but despite what the movies say there is no such thing as a hit man. In New Orleans, if you are talking to a mysteriously charismatic man who offers to take care of your ‘personal problems’ for a wedge of cash, you are probably confessing your desire to conspire to murder to a police agent. That agent would be mild-mannered psychology professor Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a bland forgettable person who discovers a hidden talent for charismatic role-play, using his psychological skills to create a persona specific to his target. On a job, Gary becomes attracted to Madison (Adria Arjona), first dissuading her from ‘hiring him’ to kill her husband and then starting a relationship with her ‘in character’ as ‘Ron’. But relationships prove to be as risky for fake hit men as they would be for real ones.

To say where Hit Man, Linklater’s darkly twisted rom-com, heads would be to spoil it (let’s just say I didn’t see where it’s going) and the journey is a fabulous ride. Linklater and Powell collaborated on a (heavily) fictionalised version of this true story and pull together a smart, sexy, witty and at times surprisingly dark film, which make some shrewd points about the extent to which we choose and shape our own identities. Hit Man sees Linklater so confidently shift tone and mood within scenes, that you almost don’t notice how smoothly the film travels from farce to psychological insight to Postman Always Ring Twice sexiness to screwball wit to morally shady action. It’s a terrific ride.

It’s also a superb showcase for Glen Powell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater. This should be a star-making role for Powell, in which he deftly plays mild-mannered and timid and darkly charismatic, often in the same scene. What’s so superb about Powell’s performance is how fluid it is, his two personalities (mild Gary and confident Ron) overlapping and merging into each other from moment-to-moment, or switching in response to sudden changes of situation. Powell and Linklater carry this out with real subtlety from moment to moment but watch the first scene and the last and you immediately notice the difference in our lead from the man we met at first.

Powell is both extremely funny – sequences showing the dizzying array of characters (from red necks to prissy Snape-ish goths) he becomes to lure in his targets are hilariously done – but also wonderfully engaging. Beneath the surface, it’s clear Gary is thrilled by how differently he is perceived when he becomes ‘Ron’, grinning as he overhears his police colleagues confess how exciting and sexy ‘Ron’ is compared to boring bird-watcher Gary. He finds he takes on a whole new confidence – and accompanying sexual prowess – as he throws himself into a dizzyingly sexual fling with Madison, who is also far more excited about the prospect of illicit sex with a killer than she probably would be with sweet rumpy-pumpy with a tenured psychology professor. Powell captures this all wonderfully, throwing himself into a tangled web of deceit with gleeful gusto.

Adria Arjona is similarly excellent as Madison, a woman who becomes harder and harder to read as the film continues. Its early stages really feels like a traditional rom-com – except the ‘meet cute’ features one person trying to hire another for murder, before they charm each other with cat puns – but the relationship shifts as much as the film itself does. Madison seems to come to life, filled with sexually excited recklessness, as she spends time with Ron. But Arjona is able to imply half a dozen things under the surface: is Madison a downtrodden girl enjoying a brush with danger, or is she some sort of manipulative femme fatale?

Linklater uses this to maintain a real high-wire tension in the film, which increasingly becomes impossible to predict. Both Gary and Madison are playing with fire here. If Gary’s dalliance with a former ‘client’ is discovered by his superiors – or if a chance encounter unmasks him to Madison – hell knows what might happen next. And can he keep the pretence that he is capable of ruthless, skilled violence, something much harder to do when your date takes you to a firing range and asks you to teach her? And what is Madison’s game, as it emerges that her break with her boyfriend isn’t as clean as she suggests it is – does she have something in mind that Gary isn’t prepared for?

Hit Man balances this brilliantly with the comedy, in one of Linklater’s most delightfully off-beat films, expertly played by Powell and Arjona. It’s underpinned with a deftly layered thematic message. Throughout we are reminded, by Gary’s psychology lectures to his increasingly engaged students, that people balance their own ids and egos and eventually ‘choose’ where they land. In doing so they create their own personality. It’s what we realise we are watching in this film. Both Gary and Madison decide they like more than a few of the elements of the people they are pretending to be – so why not mix them into their own personality? Suddenly they find themselves effortlessly capable of things they never thought possible – yet still embracing passions their playful alter-egos would find dull beyond belief.

It leads to a surprisingly ending that comes from left-field, but we realise we have been prepared for by Linklater and Powell almost from the film’s opening moments. It makes for a supremely entertaining and rewarding film, brilliantly played by its two leads (and it bears repeating that Powell is sensational here), with excellent support from Austin Amelio as a sleazy cop and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s more playful police colleagues. Hit Man is a dynamic, funny, sexy and surprising treat.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

You’ll feel the need for speed in this triumphant better-than-the-original sequel

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Tom Cruise (Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell), Miles Teller (Lt Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw), Jennifer Connelly (Penny Benjamin), Jon Hamm (Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson), Glen Powell (Lt Jack “Hangman” Seresin), Monica Barbaro (Lt Natasha “Phoenix” Trace), Lewis Pullman (Lt Robert “Bob” Floyd), Ed Harris (Rear Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain), Val Kilmer (Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky), Charles Parnell (Rear Admiral Solomon “Warlock” Bates)

It’s been 38 years since Tom Cruise last felt that need for speed. Top Gun is a sentimental favourite, partially because its the ultimate brash, loud, Reaganite 1980s Hollywood film. But (whisper it), it’s not actually – and never has been – a very good film. Perhaps though that’s all for the best: Top Gun has so little of merit in it, it offers an almost completely blank canvas for a sequel. It helps the team create Top Gun: Maverick, a film so insanely entertaining it should carry some sort of health warning.

Decades have passed and Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is pretty much the greatest pilot in the world, deliriously skilled at everything in the cockpit and pretty much hopeless at anything outside it. He’s distrusted by all his superiors except his old wingman Iceman (Val Kilmer). Thanks to Iceman he is selected to train the next generation of pilots at TOP GUN for an impossible mission to take out a nuclear plant in a “hostile nation” (clearly Iran). One of that next generation is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Maverick’s late best friend “Goose”, the guilt for whose death Maverick never recovered from. After Maverick tried to prevent Rooster from following in his father’s footsteps – not able to stand the thought of being responsible for the deaths of both his surrogate brother and son – can the two overcome their problems?

Top Gun: Maverick was delayed from hitting cinema screens for nearly two years thanks to Covid. Cruise resisted all opportunities to sell it to streaming: a decision vindicated by the supreme big-screen entertainment it offers. This one you really do need to see on the big screen. Its aerial footage is so stunning it makes the original look like tricycles on training wheels. Combined with that though, and unlike the original, Maverick has a thoughtful and engaging emotional storyline, with characters who change through well thought out emotional arcs.

But I’ll be honest, the staggering, visceral enjoyment of these plane sequences is probably the principal thing you’ll immediately take out of the film. Working from a training programme partly devised by Cruise, the film shows the impact of punishing G-forces by… actually putting the actors in planes travelling at these huge speeds. Unlike Top Gun, with its blue-screen cockpit shots, there is no doubt Cruise, Teller et al are actually in the planes as they bank at impossible speeds. Partially shot by the actors themselves – sitting the camera up in their cockpits – the film literally shows you the scenery flashing by. It’s Cruise’s mantra of doing it for real taken to a stunning degree. It’s the simple old-fashioned joy of knowing almost everything you see is real.

The mission this time is far more detailed: effectively it’s a steal from Star Wars, our heroes required to fly through a narrow ravine (below the radars of surface to air missiles) before climbing a steep bank and using their laser targeting to successfully blast a small access port. (It won’t surprise you to hear that on the final mission one character has to “use the force” when their targeting laser fails). Maverick’s training programme pushes the pilots to the limit, while his extraordinary flight skills quickly win their awe (in the first session he challenges all the pilots to take him down in a simulated dogfight, with everyone shot down doing 200 press-ups – Maverick does zero, everyone else 200+). Kosinski shoots with a cool clarity that makes you feel you are being punched by G-force.

But Top Gun: Maverick would just be a showcase for cool planes without its emotional heart. And it’s the intelligent and involving story that makes it work. Cruise is at his charismatic movie star best as Maverick – he knows exactly how to win the audience over – but his cocksure confidence is underpinned by a growing sense of fear at the risks he puts others through. Unlike the navy, his main concern is to get the pilots back alive and his guilt-ridden treasured memory of Goose is the hallmark of a man who never managed to put ends before means. He’ll take any risk himself, but balks at taking chances with anyone else’s life.

It’s what drives his troubled relationship with Rooster. The two have a surrogate father-son relationship, fractured by Maverick’s attempt to keep Rooster safe out of the cockpit. (Pleasingly, Rooster does not hold Maverick responsible for his father’s death, only for derailing his career.) The relationship between these two – Cruise’s Maverick quietly desperate to rebuild some sort of familial connection and Rooster shouldering resentment for a father-figure he clearly still loves – is handled with a great deal of tact and honesty. It really works to carry a wallop.

It’s also part of how Maverick’s place in the world, and decisions in life, are being questioned. As made clear in a prologue where he thumbs his nose at a sceptical Admiral (no one scowls like Ed Harris) by taking a prototype jet out for test run, he’s both a relic and a guy who doesn’t know when to stop (he wrecks the jet by pushing past the target of 10 Mach by trying to go another .2 faster). Unlike Iceman – a touching cameo from a very ill Val Kilmer that leaves a lump in the throat – Maverick never fit in within a military organisation (“They’re called orders Maverick”). He’s lonely, his past failed relationship with Jennifer Connelly’s Penny just one of many roads-not-taken. (There is no mention of Kelly McGillis’ character.) In a world of digital drones, he’s an analogue pilot flying by instinct: his days are numbered.

This is proper, meaty, thematic stuff explored in a series of involving personal arcs which by the end not only leaves you gripped because of the aerial drama, but also genuinely concerned about the characters. I can’t say that about the original. Top Gun: Maverick is not only a thematically and emotionally richer story – carried with super-star charisma by Cruise – than the original, it’s also more exciting and more punch-the-air feelgood. This sort of thing really is what the big screen is for.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

Will Lily James and Michiel Huisman find true love in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? You have one guess.

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Lily James (Juliet Ashton), Michiel Huisman (Dawsey Adams), Glen Powell (Mark Reynolds), Jessica Brown Findlay (Elizabeth McKenna), Katherine Parkinson (Isola Pribby), Matthew Goode (Sidney Stark), Tom Courtenay (Eben Ramsey), Penelope Wilton (Amelia Maugery)

Every so often I get challenged to write a really short review. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is the sort of film where I could almost write a review that was shorter than the film’s title. Look at the poster – everything you are now expecting from this movie, it completely delivers. It’s as warm, unthreatening, comfortable and familiar as Sunday dinner at your Gran’s.

In 1948, novelist Juliet Ashton (Lily James – so winning you overlook the fact that she’s clearly too young for the part) receives a chance letter from Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), a farmer in Guernsey. Adams tells her about the book club that sprang up between himself and other islanders during Guernsey’s occupation by the Nazis, where reading books gave them a chance to escape the horrors of the occupation. Leaving her slightly put-out American fiancée (Mark Reynolds) in London (one guess as to what romantic pairing we’ll end the film with, by the way) she heads to Guernsey to meet the group and write an article about them – and finds herself swept up in a mystery around missing member of the club Elizabeth McKenna (Jessica Brown Findley).

It’s a film that virtually writes itself, the sort of predictable Sunday-afternoon, British film where the 1940s look impossibly glamourous and everything turns out wonderfully happily in the end. You won’t be challenged by anything in it, you can simply sit back and enjoy it. Everyone involved in the film does clearly understand what they are making here though: it’s light, fluffy and unchallenging but it’s professionally made and everyone gives it their all.

Perhaps it’s a sign of how much the film is pitching for the Downton Abbey audience that it has no fewer than four actors from that show in key roles. Lily James is radiant and charismatic as Juliet – sweetly earnest and also with a determination to wrestle out a truth once she senses a story. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that she is going to be won away from her dull Yankee pilot (Glen Powell in a totally thankless role of blandness) by the earthy, romantic, caring and intellectually stimulating charm of Game of Thrones’ Dario Naaheris, Michiel Huisman (the sort of role an actor can play standing on his head but he’s still very good).

Penelope Wilton does some good work as a widow clinging to happier memories that she can’t bear to see affected by harsher truths. Jessica Brown Findley has little to do, but to be honest it’s not a problem as the part is such a straight re-tread of her Lady Sybil role from Downton she could probably do it in her sleep. The last Downton alumnus, Matthew Goode, is rather funny as Juliet’s sweet but good-naturedly exasperated publisher. For the rest of the cast, Katherine Parkinson oscillates between comic timidity and soulful sensitivity and Tom Courtenay gives a playful old man performance which can’t have stretched him.

Not being stretched is what the film is all about. Even the mystery at the film’s centre isn’t particularly gripping or – even when the truth is revealed – something that really has much impact on anything. And it’s hardly the focus anyway. It’s really a film that wants you to enjoy the photography and landscapes, and to root for the two leads to fall in love with each other. It wants you to feel little else, and carefully avoids getting you to invest your emotions in other aspects of the story so you can’t get upset. It’s the sort of film that you could call “lovely”, that passes an hour or two perfectly well, and at the end of it you’ll tell people it was fine. Then you’ll never think about it again. Ever.