One thing I can say for the new Scottish samurai western Tornado is that, partway through, as I was wondering why one of the major characters even existed, the movie had the good sense to kill him off. Although then I wondered even more why he was there in the first place.
I call Tornado a Scottish samurai western, but really, it’s not much of most of those things. It does take place in Scotland in the late 18th century, as a teenage Japanese girl is on the run from a rough-looking group of men. We learn, as we head into flashback, that this girl is the daughter of a samurai who roamed the area in a large cart, putting on puppet shows for the nearby villages, and that the men killed her father because they were mad about some missing gold, and now they’re after her for the same reason.
We see how the father tried to teach his daughter about patience and fighting, and how she didn’t really seem to have much interest in being there, which is understandable, given she’s a teenager. But no one else in the movie seems to have much interest in being there, either—I can only assume it’s that the actors were directed this way, but there’s very little energy to go around, and a few of them seem outright irritated to be there at all. Tim Roth, as the gang’s ringleader, seems game, as he usually does, but he also spends most of the movie sitting down with a large gash in his stomach, which half makes me wonder if he arrived on set, got the lay of the land, and made a clever suggestion that would let him mostly relax all day.
Presumably, Tornado is meant as an homage to the related films of Kurosawa and John Ford, but simply having some of those elements and lifting a few shots from those earlier movies isn’t enough to pay real tribute. Even the chase scenes are dour, low-energy affairs, with a character simply running into and out of frame, and after we literally go in a circle for an hour, the eventual revenge paid on the villains feels almost perfunctory. There’s minimalist and then there’s nothing-al-ist, and you can probably tell by now where Tornadolands.
Tornado is in theaters May 30th.
