Metacritic Film

Twister

Starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck, and Sean Whalen

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for intense depiction of very bad weather

Warner Bros.
Action  |  Drama  |  Suspense/Thriller
113 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters May 10, 1996

The largest storm to hit Oklahoma in more than half a century is brewing, and it promises to drop multiple twisters into Tornado Alley. It's the storm that two rival groups of scientists have been waiting for to earn their place in meteorological history. (Warner Bros.)

WRITTEN BY
Michael Crichton
Anne-Marie Martin

DIRECTED BY
Jan de Bont

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

68 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 San Francisco Chronicle
It's hard to dislike a picture with flying cows and oil trucks.
89 Austin Chronicle
It's a keeper, a tumultuous love story set against the backdrop of 24 hours of really, really inclement weather in the Oklahoma heartland.
88 USA Today
A summer crowd-pleaser worthy of its wind.
80 Los Angeles Times
Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to the rush of raw excitement "Twister" creates is that it makes it possible to ignore the painful awkwardness of the film's expository sequences and thudding dialogue of the "OK, boss lady, hold your horses" variety.
80 The New Republic
Twister is full of marvelous special effects. The story exists only to provide some respite between those marvels, like dialogue in an opera full of terrific arias. [10 June 1996, p.24]
80 Empire Ian Nathan
This film encompasses everything that is both grating and great about the blockbuster. It gives scant regard to character depth or dialogue while still being a must-see hoopla of computer trickery that weakens the knees and raises the neck-hairs.
80 The New York Times
Hurtling pace, by-the-numbers character development and exotic science. Tornado-chasing suddenly takes on a sex appeal not usually associated with horrendous storms.
75 ReelViews
Doesn't have any pretensions. It is what it sets out to be: an effective piece of big money, early summer entertainment designed to blow viewers away.
75 Entertainment Weekly
And for a movie that stars acts of God, this work of mortals provides surprisingly little liftoff. The stuff that whips through the angry skies in Twister is the most exciting part of the spectacle. Essentially, we're turned on by debris.
70 Variety
Another theme park ride of a movie without an ounce of emotional credibility to it, Twister succeeds on its own terms by taking the audience somewhere it has never been before: into a tornado's funnel.
70 Chicago Reader
The engineering of the special effects is fairly impressive, and the sight of so many objects and creatures being buffeted about carries a certain apocalyptic splendor.
63 Chicago Sun-Times
You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it.
60 TV Guide Staff (Not Credited)
Extreme-weather buffs, thrill-ride junkies and anyone else in search of mindless entertainment need look no further.
50 Christian Science Monitor
Audiences may howl at the hackneyed plot and dialogue, but you won't hear them over the Dolby sound effects assaulting your eardrums at a gazillion decibels.
40 Washington Post
The scenes of destruction-apart from being great to watch-provide much-needed relief from these people's unidimensional banalities.
40 Washington Post
Twister not only blows, it sucks, too.
38 San Francisco Examiner
Big swirls of computer-generated dirt, a bickering couple and the dead certainty that the fiancee will leave and the bickerers will get back together. An exciting night out, or what?

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