There’s a scene with a puppet show in “Tornado” where the storyteller narrates the thematic underpinning of his story, explaining his villain’s motivation for his murderous deeds as “the most evil of all reasons: no reason at all.” It’s an interesting idea that sounds cool, yet it has no real connection to this story (the bad guys have reasons aplenty in this one). This is fitting, though, because this movie is full of interesting ideas and images without any meaningful connection to them.
“Tornado” starts in medias res, with the eponymous teenager (Kôki) running from a group of thieves tracking her across a sparsely populated British island territory circa 1790. A flashback reveals that these same bandits carelessly left the gold from their recent heist lying about during a puppet show Tornado and her father performed, which allowed a small boy (Nathan Malone) to make off with the loot. The gang’s leader, Sugar (Tim Roth), initiates a search that leads to violence, mayhem, and the chase featured in the opening minutes, all of which is complicated by his adult son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), and that young man’s flirtation with betrayal.
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So, yeah, the bad guys have plenty of reasons for doing the things that they do, here (the “good” guys, too). In fact, the only person who’s following this overt thematic edict is writer/director John Maclean (“Slow West”), who has crafted a story with plenty of conflict yet with characters that have the narrative propulsion of an unmanned canoe. Because “Tornado” opens mid-story, there is no chance for the audience to find a reason to care about what happens before shit begins to pop off, which might have been okay if the rest of the story provided a purpose to this end…which it never does.
Tornado and the Boy pile mistake upon mistake while everyone around them suffers for it, leading to a dilemma for the audience, as there aren’t many people worth rooting for, here. What’s worse, abrupt cuts in the action and a tendency to have the camera look away or zoom out at the moment of impact robs many of the exciting scenes of any urgency or payoff. And while the basic elements of the story keep things moderately interesting insofar as this is a gorgeous movie about simple, visually legible things, there’s just not a lot of fun to be had with it all.
The time period also raises a number of questions, as the speech, mannerisms, and clothing place this closer to 1990 than to 1790. There’s a mix of weapons featured in the story that do play an important part in the events (arrows, swords, pistols), and while the late-18th century lends itself well to this plot element (an active revolution in killing technology), it fails to do so in any other relevant area.
Strong performances by the actors and the work of D.P. Robbie Ryan keep things palatable, though, and at a crisp 90-minute runtime, “Tornado” feels longer than it is and looks better than it has any right to. The stark Autumnal landscape sets the color palette for the characters and set pieces, robbing them of color while opening up a universe of light and shade for Ryan’s camera. It’s a visual feast from start to finish, and Ryan’s work provides the depth, warmth, and nuance lacking in the dialogue-sparse script.
Kôki holds the screen well as the spoiled teenager forced to grow up in a hurry, and Roth’s performance as the put-upon thief king is quiet but never dull. Channeling a sort of menacing criminality that’s more akin to someone supervising a DMV location, his Sugar character seems more exhausted than evil. Takehiro Hira also does strong work in his limited screentime as Tornado’s father, and does his best to paper over all the gaps in the script with his pearls of “eastern” wisdom.
Which is all to say that Maclean has made a very handsome movie with good performances that struggle to find purchase in a script that doesn’t know what to do with them. A basic lost-and-found loot movie that’s thin on character and even thinner on new ideas for what amounts to little more than a genre exercise, “Tornado” doesn’t have many new or unique ideas (and doesn’t connect the dots of the ones it has). Pleasant enough to look at but impossible to care about, this movie isn’t bad because it fails at what it sets out to do, but because of the most evil of all reasons: it never figures out its reason to be at all. [D]
