Tornado
"Tornado" is possibly the most perfect example of this thought, as its unrelentingly singular theme seems to be "kill or be killed." Set in the harsh countryside of Britain in the 1790s, everything and everyone can and will kill you, and kindness is usually rewarded with a punch to the face. The bare-bones plot revolves around a gang of ruthless criminals led by the notorious Sugarman (Tim Roth) who have recently stolen two bags of gold. When two of the gang members stop to watch a travelling Samurai show, a young boy makes off with the gold, leading to a long series of everyone chasing after whoever happens to take the gold next.
The body count starts to rise almost immediately. At one point, Roth slashes the throat of someone who appears to be part of his gang with no explanation. A house gets completely trashed and its residents beaten up just because the current gold holders might be hiding there. A guy slips in the mud and breaks his arm. Everything is worst in this movie, and there are very few pauses for anything resembling a speck of happiness.
Finally, our protagonist arrives: a young woman named Tornado (Kōki) who is part of the traveling Samurai show. She isn't exactly a rosy character herself, and only seems to garner sympathy from the audience because she is a young immigrant woman being chased by a gang of cruel older men. She spots the young boy stealing the gold and takes it from him (pushing him off a moving cart in the process), which eventually leads to her father being killed by Sugarman's gang. From then on, she's on the run, stopping to hide only long enough for whatever poor soul happens to get in her path to be dispatched by the gang.
It's a relentless march of cruelty that grows tiresome pretty quickly. There is little dialogue for long stretches, as fight-or-flight is the only thing the movie is concerned with. Director of photography Robbie Ryan (“Poor Things”) does a lot of heavy lifting, using lots of wide shots to utilize the harsh but beautiful terrain that our characters flee across. It's a sharp-looking movie, which often elevates scenes when not much else is going on.
Tornado predictably becomes an agent of revenge for her father (who she didn't seem to care for much in the first place) and hunts Sugarman's gang down one by one in a series of bloody confrontations. I was rooting for her only due to inertia at this point, as my eyes were well glazed over due to all the previous violence; each one of her kills wasn't exactly badass, just more of the same. There wasn't much separating her from one of Sugarman's gang by the end of the movie, so it was hard to develop any kind of heroic emotional attachment to her (or to anyone). It didn't help that Kōki, a Japanese model and songwriter, was unable to provide the gravitas needed to carry the movie on her shoulders (which she was perhaps unfairly asked to do). Her physical performance was good, and she did spend the majority of her screen time running, hiding, or fighting, but many of her spoken lines landed awkwardly, likely not helped by not having much to work with.
It's hard to know what we're supposed to make of this bleak and nihilistic piece of work from Scottish writer/director John Maclean in his first movie since 2015's "Slow West." As Tornado's father states, the majority of characters are only motivated by “the most evil of all reasons — no reason at all.” It's next to impossible to get too invested in a movie with that message at its heart, and for all of its visual prowess, it quickly becomes apparent that there's not much else here to hold onto, other than our own gratitude that we don't have to live in this world.
