Supercell winds up erring a bit too much on the side of caution. For a while, Anna Elizabeth James and director Herbert James Winterstern’s screenplay takes great care to introduce us to real-seeming, genuine characters who just happen to be caught up in a massive natural disaster. A major Hollywood blockbuster from the mid-1990s comes to mind as the obvious precursor here, both in terms of the scenes of weather-based spectacle and in the attention paid to its ensemble cast. Groups of the characters find themselves splintered into factions over the course of this story, and instead of simply using them as fodder for being sucked away by a particularly massive twister, the filmmakers give them a story and distinctive personalities — again, for a while.
The priority here is clearly the destruction of the tornado, which overtakes every other considerable concern in the family drama that ensues. The narrative initially follows William (Daniel Diemer), whose insistence upon following his father’s footsteps as a weather tracker behind the wheel is the cause of great concern for his mother, Quinn (the late Anne Heche). She wants nothing to do with that life anymore, having had to give up her own promising career upon her husband’s death during a storm-chasing escapade. Naturally, his curiosity overwhelms him in this movie about the strain and pull of legacy and one’s proverbial calling, and William embarks on a road trip to find something within himself.
That search leads to Roy (Skeet Ulrich), who was William’s dad’s partner in chasing tornadoes and now, quite reluctantly, allows William to accompany him on a trip to follow a new supercell tornado that is forming. Hot on their tail once she realizes what her son is up to, of course, is Quinn, who hops in a car with William’s sort-of-girlfriend Harper (Jordan Kristine Seamón). The real story of the movie, inevitably, is the tornado, brought to life with not a whole lot of budget and only a marginal amount of storytelling urgency. The screenplay introduces another character in Zane, Roy’s newer partner in storm-chasing, played with a modicum of intelligence and pathos by an otherwise utterly wasted Alec Baldwin, and the other members of Roy’s team might as well be interchangeable.
For the period of time that this is solely about the domestic and familial drama within William’s fraught relationship with Quinn and budding semi-fraternal relationship with Roy, though, Supercell is elevated beyond what we typically expect from this sort of movie. The filmmakers are wise to frontload their movie with so much of this material, because the performances from Diemer, Ulrich and especially Heche (who was always so skilled at roles requiring this level of nuance) are strong enough to keep our interest on them. All the little detours away from that drama and toward the impending doom of the tornado, even though the entire premise of the movie hinges upon the disaster elements, are underwhelming — both in how generally unconvincing they are and in how much they undermine the drama of the film’s set-up.
Photo courtesy of Saban Films
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