Tornado is a samurai spaghetti western starring Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Takehiro Hira (among others). Samurai spaghetti westerns aren’t anything new. In fact, we wouldn’t have spaghetti westerns if it weren’t for the samurai genre – Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964) was, as Clint Eastwood conceded, an ‘obvious rip-off’* of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) – yet this may be the first one set in 1790 and filmed in Scotland. It may also be the first one to feature thick woollens and tweed. That makes it sound twee which it isn’t. It’s a super-bloody revenge story filmed in just 25 days with a running time of 90 minutes. We love a 90-minute film, so I feel bad saying this, but it does feel as if it needed more time to cook.
It comes flying out the gate flying, opening mid-chase with an adolescent girl (played by Koki, a famous Japanese singer-songwriter and model) running from the gang of outlaws who are on her trail. The outlaws are led by Sugarman (Roth) who would slit your throat at the drop of a hat. (The endless violence is darkly comic; expect chopped off limbs and geysers of spurting blood.) He has a resentful son, Little Sugar (Lowden), while the other woollen- and tweed-clad gang members have Guy Ritchie-esque names like Kitten (Rory McCann) or Squid Lips (Jack Morris). This is the sort of film Tom Hardy should be in but isn’t. The gang pursue the girl through the forest into a mansion where she hides. What has she done? Questions are answered with a jump back in time to events earlier that day.
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