Tornado – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Tor­na­do – first-look review

27 Feb 2025

Words by David Jenkins

A man embraces a woman tenderly against a desolate, windswept landscape.
A man embraces a woman tenderly against a desolate, windswept landscape.
John Slow West” Maclean returns with a Samu­rai-inspired heist thriller set in the Eng­lish wilds – the eccen­tric results are mixed.

An entire decade has slipped by since the release of John Maclean’s debut fea­ture, the frisky meta west­ern Slow West, which, if noth­ing else, pre­sent­ed a savvy oper­a­tor han­ker­ing to get his mitts dirty in the world of genre film. His belat­ed return to writ­ing and direct­ing retains a dash of eccen­tric­i­ty and a fond­ness for fold­ing up and repur­pos­ing con­ven­tion like it were a lit­tle origa­mi bird, but this sad­ly feels a lot more like a creaky first film than /​/​Slow West/​/​did way back when.

Draw­ing on the macho, high-plains sagas of Ser­gio Leone and Aki­ra Kurosawa’s games of psy­cho­log­i­cal chess, Tor­na­do fol­lows a Japan­ese father-daugh­ter duo trundling down the mud­died byways of rur­al Scot­land in the late 1700s and ply­ing their trade as per­form­ers of a samu­rai-themed pup­pet show. She, named Tor­na­do (Kōki), is ter­ri­bly bored with her lot, while he (Take­hi­ro Hira), embraces the qui­et nobil­i­ty of this arti­san profession.

It’s not long before a hoard of gurn­ing, grime-cov­ered goons, each tooled-up with their own sig­na­ture weapon, are chas­ing her across the land­scape, because she pounced on the split-sec­ond oppor­tu­ni­ty to relieve them of two sacks of gold coins, the plun­der from a crim­i­nal enter­prise and en route to be divvyed out equally. 

The gang is led by Tim Roth’s Sug­ar­man, who is basi­cal­ly Tim Roth were Tim Roth a poet­i­cal­ly-inclined 18th cen­tu­ry mis­cre­ant, who is at log­ger­heads with his son Lit­tle Sug­ar (Jack Low­den) who wants noth­ing more than to get one over on his abu­sive pop and his pals. Maybe this span­ner in the works might be the right time to stick the knife in?

You can see what Maclean is aim­ing for here, but it feels as if he’s care­ful­ly select­ed a few mod­est ingre­di­ents, and rather than com­bin­ing them to con­coct a sub­tle, gourmet dish, we have a few strong flavours that don’t real­ly work in con­cert. The heist/​chase mechan­ics are decent, but it’s all far too schemat­ic and the sub­tle twists are often stealthy plot devices rather than ways into the drama.

On the atmos­pher­ics front, the film fares much bet­ter, with Rob­bie Ryan’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy draw­ing out an autum­nal haze of the spar­tan land­scape, and some love­ly lit­tle folksy pro­duc­tion design embell­ish­ments from Eliz­a­beth El-Kad­hi. Part of the sto­ry takes in an encamp­ment of trav­el­ling play­ers, and the design of their mobile lodg­ing and paint­ed sig­nage is a joy to behold. It’s just a shame that they have so lit­tle to add to the story. 

The real prob­lem here is a script which favours bathet­ic procla­ma­tions over any real desire to get under the skins of the char­ac­ters. Tor­na­do her­self as the feisty hero­ine is trag­i­cal­ly one dimen­sion­al, and the only real ten­sion in the film derives from the testy father-son rela­tion­ship between Roth and Low­den. And even that comes to a head in a way that’s both anti­cli­mac­tic and illogical.

It’s laud­able that Maclean wants to breathe new life into unabashed B” mate­r­i­al that has been done to death from every angle, but unfor­tu­nate­ly the idio­syn­crat­ic touch­es have usurped rather than bol­stered what should be robust, time-hon­oured noir frame­work, and we’re left with a film which leaves only a super­fi­cial impres­sion and lit­tle sense of purpose.

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