Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

‘Into the Storm’ will be summer’s biggest guilty pleasure

The found-footage disaster flick “Into the Storm’’ is “Twister’’ for dummies, but by no means is that an insult. The new film is enormous fun if you’re in the right mood.

For starters, it’s just 89 minutes long, several of them devoted to listing its special-effects technicians in the closing credits. And the special effects are much better than you might expect from the trailers — and from a medium-budget film without big stars like “Twister” headliner Helen Hunt, who often demand big dramatic scenes that tend to slow down the movie.

The effects in “Into the Storm” may not be state-of-the-art, but they get the job done — and there’s lots of wham, bang, thank you, man!

Matt Walsh (the affable Mike McLintock of HBO’s “Veep’’) is very funny as Pete, the gung-ho leader of a team of professional storm chasers who’s going to lose his heavily armored truck unless he comes up with hurricane footage, stat.

The cast tries to take cover in “Into the Storm.”Warner Bros. Pictures

The other adult lead is Richard Armitage — the British actor taking a break from playing Thorin Oakenshield in “The Hobbit’’ trilogy — as Gary, a widowed assistant principal at a high school in an unidentified Midwestern state that’s nearly ground zero for killer tornadoes.

Will Gary be able to rescue his son, who becomes trapped in an old mill with a sexy classmate (Alycia Debnam Carey) after the first of the twisters hits? And will he hook up with the single-mom meteorologist who persuades a reluctant Pete to help?

That ultimately matters less than seeing whether Pete scores the ultimate money shot — and seeing what happens when one of his camera assistants gets caught in a twister that’s sucking up flaming gasoline.

There are no “Twister’’-like flying cows in “Into the Storm,’’ but there’s an airborne tractor trailer and all sorts of creative mayhem as the fictional town of Silverton is flattened by a series of progressively stronger — and highly photogenic — digitally-created tornadoes that make the one impersonated by a muslin stocking in “The Wizard of Oz’’ seem benign.

Director Steven Quale, a veteran of the “Final Destination’’ series, expertly uses the shaky-cam format to freshen up the disaster genre, though he cheats with shots that couldn’t possibly be captured by one of the characters’ cameras. And screenwriter John Swetnam (also credited with the new “Step Up All In”) name-checks John Updike as he cooks up an army of stereotypical characters.

“Into the Storm’’ delivers where it counts, though — it moves like lightning, with loads of well-staged disaster footage and a pulse-pounding climax with the mother of all twisters and a heroic sacrifice.