This is just a bad day for everyone across the board.
Tornado is set almost entirely over one day in which things go wrong very fast, then just keep getting worse. At one point a character slips, goes down and breaks their arm, and instead of it seeming contrived, you just think, “Yup. It’s that kinda day.”
A combination of bad luck and bad choices leads to disaster for the titular character Tornado. It’s Scotland in 1790 and Tornado and her father set up their travelling puppet show on the side of a road. Folk stop to watch the show, including some bandits on their way back from a job with a huge stolen fortune. All it takes is a little boy pickpocketing the crowd to turn it into everyone’s worst day.
Tim Roth plays Sugarman, the leader of the gang of bandits, comfortable in a familiar role as the hardened criminal dispensing casual brutality, and very fun to watch. Jack Lowden plays Little Sugar, son of Sugarman and possibly the only person who hates Sugarman as much as his victims. Rory McCann plays the muscle of the outfit as Kitten, while Dennis Okwera plays Pyscho, the deadly blade of the group. Okwera looks so cool this whole movie, in a badass outfit, being really intimidating, and I was disappointed when he didn’t get a single line or even seem lit properly in a lot of his shots. Felt he was underused.
Koki plays Tornado, a petulant teenager who has to do all her growing up in one day. Tornado has learnt from her father the fighting style of the samurai, and when it seems darkest before the dawn, she must turn to this training to seek her revenge. It’s great to see a samurai movie set in Scotland, but I always forget that every samurai movie is 10% samurai-ing and 90% waiting to samurai.
Nonetheless, the film is good fun.