Into the Storm

A simple tornado just isn’t enough for the modern disaster movie. They’re just not sufficiently scary unless a) there are also sharks involved or b) there are loads of them. Wisely (if hardly scientifically), this shakycam screamer adopts the latter approach – and when the badass cyclones do muscle into town, ripping up schools, banks and airports willy-nilly, the film is fairly fun to watch. Sadly, everything else about it is, well, a bit of a disaster. The characters – including Richard ‘Thorin Oakenshield’ Armitage as a smalltown dad who can’t relate to his kids and Sarah Wayne Callies as a weather scientist – are without exception derivative and dull. The film plays fast and loose with its found-footage structure, and thanks to some epic windspeeds these cams are even more sickeningly shaky than usual. The result is diverting, but hardly worth getting in a twist over.