This spiritual (and belated) sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 hit Twisters is a bright and breezy affair (pardon the pun) that harkens back to a slightly more innocent age of disaster movie filmmaking. Twisters feels very much like a film made two years after the original, not 28 years. It’s an exciting, family-friendly movie – there’s no hardcore cussing and no sloppy kissing to irritate the nippers – and it avoids the one thing that made Twister such a frustrating experience. In the original film, it was hard to really care about the characters (the film starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, and offered an early role for Philip Seymour Hoffman) because they were constantly putting themselves in danger by throwing themselves into the eye of the storm – often quite literally – when really they should have just turned around and gone home. They were very much the architects of their own considerable misfortune. Mark L. Smith’s screenplay for Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, papers over this particular narrative crack quite smartly; our protagonists are chasing tornados because they want to ‘tame’ them and bring an end to the death and destruction they cause – and one or two quite poignant scenes set in the aftermath of a twister landing demonstrate just what power these terrifying phenomena are able to unleash.

Twisters is a very human film punctuated by some spectacular visual effects sequences. The increasingly impressive Daisy Edgar Jones plays Kate Cooper, whose college experiments with technology designed to diminish the power of tornados led to a terrible tragedy. Five years later, she’s lured back into the fray by her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos), who’s road-testing new military-designed storm-tracking equipment, but they’re immediately thrown into conflict with swaggering social media storm-chaser Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and, conveniently, a series of devastating storm systems converge on Oklahoma, the two teams find themselves fighting to stay alive whilst working on a way to control the forces of Nature itself.

Hearty action adventure in the old-school tradition, Twisters doesn’t rewrite the disaster movie rule book, but it does redefine it a bit by giving us characters we can genuinely invest in. Even when it drifts into cliché now and again, it’s bound to bring a smile to your face with its sheer chutzpah and breathless energy. Great fun.