This Scottish Samurai Movie Is the Summer's Must-See Action Flick
Slow West was a downbeat, elegiac classical Western about a love-lorn Scotsman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who travels to America to reunite with his betrothed and is assisted by a bounty hunter (Michael Fassbender) who offers him protection from marauding factions. It's a film adequately described by its title, one with no lack of action but decidedly painterly in its approach. The grisly shootouts are executed with exacting realism; they're short and brutal, hardly heroic.
Tornado is cut from the same cloth—arthouse meets down and dirty exploitation—though perhaps surprisingly, Maclean's latest falls more firmly into the latter camp. The film begins in the middle, with Tornado being pursued through the Scottish Highlands (circa 1791) by a band of swarthy criminals led by Tim Roth's Sugar Man. She seeks refuge in a posh manor, which the criminals—a significant gaggle including Sugar Man's right-hand man Kitten (Rory McCann) and his son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), who harbors a barely concealed resentment for his father—soon invade.
Suddenly, we're back at the beginning. Tornado wakes up early to assist her father, Fujin (Takehiro Ita), with his elaborate traveling puppet show, which involves blood-spewing severed limbs and a third-act samurai-sword duel between Fuji and Tornado to the delight of the assembled crowd. Bizarrely, part of the crowd includes Kitten, Little Sugar, and a few of their compatriots, who have just stolen a pot of gold and are on their way to stash it, but decide to stop off for a matinee. That's when a young scourge (Nathan Malone, credited as 'The Boy') spots the gold and steals it. But Tornado sees an opportunity to take it for herself, forever changing her and her father's fortunes. Unfortunately, Little Sugar is ahead of her game and treks after Fujin and Tornado to take the money for himself.
That breakdown almost makes Tornado sound unnecessarily convoluted, but it couldn't be any simpler or more stripped down. Maclean's film is almost deceptively slight, featuring little dialogue and hardly any explanation at all for what's happening. This is a film which requires you to actively engage with it, one which tells most of its story through the silent expressions of its characters.
Part of the reason this works particularly well within the context of Tornado is because, though the film is an exhilarating marvel, it's a story we've seen a thousand times before. There's no need to over-explain, or even explain, some things because if you've seen one film in this genre, you probably get it already. The cast, including a simmering Joanne Whalley and a welcome Raphaël Thiéry, is roundly up to the task. In her first major film role, Kōki, proves a formidable presence. Though she remains largely unknown around the rest of the world, in her native Japan, she's a model and singer who's achieved a level of fame on par with Taylor Swift. Roth is particularly exceptional, playing Sugar Man with a morbid subtlety which seems to hint that his character has died long before the film begins. It's a breathtaking performance which shows, once again, how eternally talented and confident Roth is as an actor.If there's any ambiguity, Tornado is a masterful picture and a delightfully immersive work. It's incredibly rare to see a film which is not only so completely sure of what it is but is constantly in concert with itself. There isn't a single moment that's out of tune, nor an image that doesn't feel a part of this world. It's at once a chase movie and a character piece, a film which rarely slows down and reinvents its simple narrative with a series of well-chosen set-piece locations. Maclean wisely withholds much of the samurai action until the last act, but when Tornado unleashes her rage, it comes fast and furious. It's both shockingly gory and smartly curtailed (no 20-minute duels here, folks), recalling classic samurai pictures in which the battles consisted of a few well-timed strokes of the blade.
The utter brilliance of Maclean is that he trusts his audience and treats them with intelligence. As a result, he delivers a spare, 85-minute thriller with an abundance of toe-tapping action, but which crucially doesn't sacrifice a powerful expression of its central conceits for length. Much like Steven Soderbergh's similarly brilliant, pared-down spy thriller Black Bag from earlier this year, Tornado is a pint-sized epic. The sleek exterior belies a kaleidoscopic exploration of humanity. It's the thinking person's popcorn movie.This Scottish Samurai Movie Is the Summer's Must-See Action Flick first appeared on Men's Journal on Jul 3, 2025
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