A straight-forward revenge flick.

Two traveling performers become involved with a gang of thieves. A young girl in a strange land must fight back against those that pursue her.

Written and directed by John Maclean, a relative newcomer to the director’s chair, Tornado is everything you’d expect from a revenge movie. Starring Tim Roth, Takehiro Hira, and Kôki in the lead role as Tornado, the film has some grisly surprises, not all you might expect. But the overall experience is fairly muted.

The film opens with Tornado, a young Asian girl running for her life over the Scottish moors. In pursuit, the Sugerman gang (led by Roth) march tirelessly on foot. We see her run into a stately home to hide, and through flashback we learn the gang are thieves. Thieves looking for a stash of misplaced gold.

Perhaps the most surprising element of Tornado is its location. Maclean is a Scottish film-maker, so the location’s murky, grey-brown location of Scottish wilderness makes sense. All of our action takes place around a large, singular lake, with a few noted locations around it. Set in the 18th century, the our fleeing protagonist’s story is unfolded to us slowly. We know what she’s running from, but not the why. The film’s escalation is slow, impatience audiences will find themselves begging: “Please, pick up the sword!” for a significant amount of time.

It is safer to say that Tornado is a mood piece, rather than a bloody, violent action movie. This isn’t John Wick. It makes sense that Tornado would be sold as the new Kill Bill, but this is inaccurate. Our performances are good, especially from Takehiro Hira (Shogun, Captain America: Brave New World) as Tornado’s protective, traditionalist father. Tim Roth’s performance is more muted as the film’s antagonist, Sugarman. His band of British thugs have some familiar faces in it. Rory McCann (Game of Thrones) for one. It plays out mostly as a sombre, sad story of a girl who has little, and in a moment of hope, lost everything else. Kôki plays both the lost innocent girl and coldly calculating samurai extremely well. It’ll be worth keeping an eye on both her and Maclean’s careers going forward.

When the action does occur, it is quite bloody but still a little muted. Airing on “realistic”, Maclean’s inspirations perhaps come from classics like Kurosawa movies. The action is more about emotional clarity versus chaos, about the people involved than the action itself. The kills are grisly at times, but others are a little plain if you are expecting high violence.
But even labelling the film as a “revenge” film is misleading. Everyone here has done wrong and are living with consequences. There’s less catharsis in killing, and more cold reality.

The film is a good watch, but don’t go in expecting a high-violence revenge flick.

Additional Marshmallows: What’s with the name Tornado? That’s literally her name?