A&E

Disaster flick ‘Into the Storm’ is no whirlwind

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Two stars

Into the Storm Sarah Wayne Callies, Matt Walsh, Richard Armitage. Directed by Steven Quale. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday.

There are no sharknadoes in Into the Storm, although there is a sort of firenado, which is the closest the movie comes to being genuinely thrilling. Otherwise, it’s full of generic characters running from CGI weather phenomena and yelling a lot. Director Steven Quale (Final Destination 5) throws it all together with a distracting, inconsistent mix of found footage and traditional filmmaking. A team of storm chasers (led by The Walking Dead’s Sarah Wayne Callies as a super-serious meteorologist and Veep’s Matt Walsh as a cynical videographer) head to an Oklahoma suburb, where a deadly superstorm is threatening the extremely uninteresting residents. Quale and screenwriter John Swetnam spend way too much time on the boring interactions between the one-dimensional characters, and when they finally deliver some hardcore tornado action, it’s underwhelming. For a once-in-a-lifetime superstorm, the tornado never seems all that dangerous, and the story ends with a whimper, the anonymous characters trudging back to their anonymous lives.

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