Indie film reviewer Christian Lisseman watches this offbeat family film about stormchasers and finds moments that shine through but a bigger ambition than it has budget.
⭐⭐⭐
Coming straight to video on demand a couple of years after it was made, Supercell is as interesting for its cast list as its plot, and possibly more so. Not only does it star the late Anne Heche in one of the last films she made before her untimely death in 2022, it also features Alec Baldwin before he became embroiled in a tragedy on the set of Rust, in which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was shot dead.
The film opens with a flashback in which Bill Brody is apparently killed by a tornado while out storm chasing on the plains of Texas, while his wife (Heche) frantically tries to get him home and his young son retreats to the roof to watch the thunder and lightning from afar. Ten years later and the now teenage son, William (Daniel Diemer), is a troubled young man who ends up trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, reconnecting with the storm chasing community, particularly his father’s one time business partner Roy (Skeet Ulrich) and reckless businessman Zane Rogers (Baldwin). Roy and Zane have cashed in on Bill Brody’s legacy to make a living by driving around daft tourists keen to have a brush with death at the hands of giant tornados sweeping across the American midwest. Meanwhile William’s mother and his best friend set out to track him down and bring him home safely before he goes the way of his father.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6509bINfvQg
Debut director and co-writer Herbert James Winterstern has fashioned a mostly feel-good family movie here. The John Williams-esq score by Corey Wallace, coupled with this boy’s own adventure tale, gives the film a Spielberg quality but without the big budget to back it up. There are also clear parallels with the 1996 disaster movie Twister, indeed there a couple of Easter Eggs buried in the film that nod to this. But whereas Twister had massive CGI tornados which took on a variety of ever more deadly forms, here the danger mainly comes from menacingly dark clouds lurking on the horizon, the odd flash of lightning, some giant tennis ball-sized hail, and lots and lots of rain. There are a couple of moments of real peril, but for the most part the biggest danger seems to lie in people getting their hair wet.
Winterstern also tries to mimic Twister with a science-backed reason for the main character’s decision to chase storms in the first place. In the ’90s film it was Helen Hunt’s character who had developed a machine that could help revolutionise tornado research and there’s something similar here, but it’s a muddled, confusing part of the story which is mostly forgotten come the climax.
Heche is great, playing a chain-smoking mum trying to hide her adventure-filled past from her son, and Ulrich too puts in a good turn, looking remarkably different and far more grown up with his short, greying beard. Baldwin plays a typical screen villain, more interested in profit than people, and seems to have fun doing it. But ultimately there’s a little bit too much in the way of clunky family dynamics and some dull explanations about storms (without anyone uttering the words “climate change!”) which get in the way of the action.
It’s an engaging enough tale, but I wasn’t exactly blown away.
Supercell is out on digital download from 12 June. Read more reviews from Christian Lisseman at stateofindependents.uk.
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