John Maclean’s first feature, the grimy, spare Western Slow West, established him as a clever manipulator of genre tropes, and capable of stretching a trim narrative film over a muscular visual, experiential frame. His long-awaited follow-up, the 18th century, British Isles-set samurai revenge thriller-cum-Western, Tornado, is equally zeroed in on simplicity and economy as his first outing. The results, however, tinged with darkly absurdist comedy and violence a la Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, don’t quite save a film propped up feebly by blunt dialogue and simple psychology.
Tornado opens with an extended chase sequence, spare on dialogue and propelled by thunderous drums and staccato strings. The titular Tornado (Japanese musician and actress Koki) is on the run from a band of ruthless criminals led by the abusive, obstinate Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his brooding, dissatisfied son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden); they believe their missing bags of gold are somewhere in Tornado’s possession.
In keeping with the film’s elemental title, the location is thoroughly windswept, practically blowing Tornado, along with an unknown and unnamed young boy who follows her, through dense woods and across wide mossy plains to the front door of a lonely manor house where she waits out the insufficient search by Sugarman’s band of largely incompetent henchmen. This sequence is full of amusing and tense bits of business, involving a very large man, rotten floorboards, and a piano resting one level below. But this all mostly serves to halt all momentum, which the film struggles intermittently to reestablish. The rest of Tornado’s action, a bloody tale of revenge and daddy issues, is drawn out in a bizarrely lethargic manner, eschewing thrills for quiet tedium and a lot of waiting around.
After the first 30 minutes, a flashback introduces Tornado and her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira), who operate and perform a samurai puppet show in a travelling theatrical troupe. Their dynamic is familiar, bordering on schematic. He’s traditional, strict, and takes their puppet show very seriously; she’s a bored teenager, sick of her monotonous life and her father’s insistence on making every simple task a lesson. During one performance, Tornado’s wandering eye quickly entangles them in Sugarman’s gang; after a shocking display of Sugarman’s brutality, her narrow escape through the woods brings us back to where we left off, in the theatrical troupe’s campgrounds.
The problem Maclean creates for the film comes from trying to imbue what could be a satisfyingly elemental B-movie with extra ingredients he doesn’t have the time or, sometimes, interest to flesh out appropriately. As such, the rich well of familial trauma from which he draws his characters’ motivations, including an obliquely acknowledged tragedy from Tornado and Fujin’s past and the physical abuse Sugarman has inflicted on Little Sugar, are elucidated in unnatural, blunt declarations that land on the narrative proceedings with an unwelcome thud.
Maclean’s timid reliance on dialogue is a particular shame because his film otherwise excels in visual expression. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography and Elizabeth El-Kadhi’s production design are spare but surprisingly sumptuous, each adding a lot of intrigue to wide open empty spaces and cramped interiors, respectively. On the performance front, Lowden and Roth shine, deftly sketching out their fractured, dependent dynamic in the film’s early scenes, long before either are forced to verbalize it explicitly. Koki and Takehiro, by nature of the script forcing their introduction into an unnecessary flashback, are hamstrung with the worst of the film’s psychological hand-holding, and the characters themselves are too simplistic to compensate, ultimately deflating the cathartic potential of their tragically delayed resolution.
DIRECTOR: John Maclean; CAST: Tim Roth, Kōki, Jack Lowden, Takehiro Hira, Joanne Whalley; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: May 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
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