Tornado

A young Japanese woman in the Scottish Highlands seeks revenge on the gang of criminals who killed her father.

Before I even hit play on this film, I had questions...

From the start, Tornado is clearly a samurai western, an idea that could be considered an oxymoron, but whatever, that's fine. It's also a film that is at least filmed in, if not actually set in, Scotland. This is a choice that was probably made due to budgetary concerns, but will probably end up feeling at best, arbitrary, and at worst, incongrouous. Tornado is also a film that was made by a Scotsman, which from any angle can't help but feel like someone telling a story that isn't their story to tell, which, to be fair, is probably not all that much of a concern in this particular situation, but still... it just adds to the general sense of "odd pieces all awkwardly melded together" that float about this film. On top of all that, what with its swords and guns, while I think this film is supposed to be set in the 1800s, from the trailer it feels kind of post-apocalyptic, or possibly that it's actually set in a fantasy world. I don't know if it is, but it's not readily apparent in the trailer, so I guess will see, but honestly, either way feels kind of weird. My point is, with all of this taken together, I'm just wondering... what is this film supposed to be?

I guess we'll find out.

At least Tim Roth is always a welcome presence. 

In Scotland in the 1790s, a young Japanese woman named Tornado flees from a gang of brigands led by a ruthless criminal known as Sugarman.

They chases her over hill and dale. When Tornado attempts to hide inside an isolated mansion, they flush her out and chase her into the woods. She manages to lose most of them in the forested hills, except for Sugarman's son Little Sugar, who both hates and envies his father, and often works against him. Little Sugar follows her from a distance, and he sees Tornado stumble across the wagons of a traveling circus. There, Tornado takes shelter within the Strongman's wagon, who is an old friend of her father.

Then there's an extended flashback...

Not too long ago, Tornado was restless teen who lived in a wagon with her father, who was once a samurai, as they travel the Scottish countryside as puppeteers and performers. Fujin, her father, teaches her the art of puppetry and swords. She is vaguely dissatisfied with her vagabond puppeteer life on the road.

Meanwhile... Sugarman and his disparate gang of killers have robbed a church of all it's gold. On their way to stash their cash, they stop along the roadside where a small crowd has gathered to watch Tornado and Fujin's performance. During the show, Tornado spots a boy working the crowd as a pickpocket, but she doesn't say anything, because she's not a snitch. He manages to steal the gang's gold without being noticed, a sequence of events the less we discuss the better... and Tornado helps him hide in their wagon. But once they're on the road, all while the bandits frantically hunt for the gold back along the roadside, she double-crosses the boy, and throws him out of the wagon, keeping the gold for herself, because while she may not be a snitch, Tornado is apparently 100% a greedy little bitch.

This is the moment that seals everyone's fate.

Unfortunately, bad luck means a fallen tree blocks the road, stopping the wagon's progrss. The gang catch up to the boy, who immediately narcs Tornado out, so they then catch up to the wagon. Tornado hides the gold in the woods, while back at the wagon, Sugarman confronts Fujin, who is unaware of the entire situation. When he has no answer for the gold's whereabouts, the gang kills him, but not before he manages to slice Sugarman in the stomach.

Tornado and the boy escape, the gang in pursuit.

The gang end up finding the circus' camp, and they kill everyone there in their hunt for Tornado and the gold. Little Sugar, emboldened by his hate for his father, and angry that the others have ruined his chance to trail Tornado back to the gold, confronts Sugarman, and after he tries to kill his father, Sugarman kills him.

Tornado and the boy flee in the chaos, but the boy is shot.

Returning to her father's wagon, Tornado buries the boy and Fujin in the woods. Then she takes the gold and drops it into the middle of a lake. Once this is done, she takes her father's sword and hat, and goes ham on the gang, tracking them all down, one by one, and dispatching them in some of the worst choreographed fights ever. In the final confrontation, she finds Sugarman, dying from his stomach wound. With his final words, he calls her a samurai.

Now alone, Tornado leaves the woods, a wandering samurai.

This film is not worth your time.

It feels like the work of an over-indulged filmschool student who fancies themselves to be an auteur, but absolutely is not. Like, not at all. Like, they mostly just wear scarves a lot and name-drop famous directors whose films they haven't seen. Tornado is also the kind of low budget film that just feels like it was filmed on property that the filmmaker owns, or maybe it's their parents that do, or maybe a friend, but either way, despite the fact that it definitely has some open and epic vistas in the background, it seems like it's being shot on the same acre the entire time. The whole thing was clearly made on the cheap, but it's the privileged kind of cheap, like "my parents actually have Hollywood connections and money" kind of cheap, not the "we mortgaged the house and shot this after-hours at our part-time jobs" kind of cheap, and you can tell this because it somehow stars people like Tim Roth, Takehiro Hira, Jack Lowden, and Rory McCann. And sans context, none of this is particularly bad, but when coupled with its myriad other issues, the whole thing just feels like a big failson project, like it's Tad's last hurrah, and if this one doesn't pan out, then he'll finally settle down and take that excutive vice president role at his dad's company.

None of that is true, of course. The writer/director is John Maclean (not to be confused with John McClane of Die Hard fame), and his last film was Slow West, which was much better than this, or at least, more interesting and generally more well-made. But that aside, I stand by my assessment that overall, Tornado has big time "untalented art school kid with money" energy.

This problem is probably best illustrated by the fact that this film is clearly attempting to be set in more of an "impressionistic" world, as in more art than reality, basically a smaurai/western version of Our Town. This is why there's no real indiciation of civilization to speak of in the film. Yes, there's the crumbling old mansion that some barely glimpsed old-money faded gentry live in, and there's a somewhat maintained forest road, there's even a "crowd" of nearly a dozen-ish people (all standing really far apart in order to seem like a larger crowd then they actually are) watching the puppet show. But as to where these people live, or why they are in the middle of nowhere watching a puppet show, or if they're traveling, or just any kind of answer to the basic question of where anyone is coming from, going to, or anything like that... it's nowhere to be found. The traveling circus is like four wagons and a wheelbarrow, and there is nothing around them. Nothing. Why they would even choose to stop there as a campgrounds? We also never see the church that was robbed either. All we ever see in this film is the same few acress of backwoods and hill country. Big and open and empty.

Which is kind of a metaphor for the film really...

Now, this is probably due to the film having almost no budget, or maybe it had a medium sized budger (which helps to explain the cast), but a sizable portion of it fell through at the 11th hour maybe, so their only option was to go and film on the Maclean Family's ancestral land, gifted to them by Robert the Bruce in 1322. What I mean is, this is probably them making the best of it, which I can appreciate. And I think they tried to lean into that, because they had no other option, hoping for a kind of French New Wave Samurai Western thing maybe...

But the result is that it heightens the unreailty of the whole thing. A samurai western in the middle of nowhere in Scotland? Why? And then this unreality, this weirdly incongruous setting sets off a cascade of noticing other issues, like how the fight choreography is absolutely terrible, like amatuer community theatre bad. The weird plot issues and conveniences stand out too, like when the thugs were looking for Tornado after she fled from the circus, why did they seem to look everywhere but back at her father's wagon, y'know... where all her stuff was, and also the last place they saw the gold?

There's no answer for these questions, or any others, because Tornado is an ill-conceived and incomplete story that is more concerned with it's cool style. Because I think that was the ultimate end goal here... if it can't make sense, then at least it looks cool doing it.

The problem is... it doesn't look cool.

Tornado puts me in mind of films like Jean-Paul Jeunet's City of Lost Children, or Tarsem Singh's The Fall or Shinsuke Sato's The Princess Blade, it has that kind of feel, but it's more in the way that it's an imitation, a pale copy, rather than a piece of art that was done in a similar style. Instead, it feels more like Into the Badlands, that tv show that set in an inexplicable Wild West fantasy world of swords, magic, kung fu, and motorcycles, but no guns because reasons, but that's more in the way that neither one of them was very good and both made no sense. It also reminded me of Reflection In A Dead Diamond, which was also more of a art project than it was an attempt to tell a story, but Tornado very much lacks Reflection In A Dead Diamond's bold styling.

In the end, there's just nothing to this movie.

Tornado is a half-assed and hollow homage, all implied meaning, all uninspired style, and absolutely no substance. It's bone without any meat. Thank god it’s only 90 minutes long, and for the most part, passes fairly quickly.

Don't bother.