13 Minutes is a fairly low budget disaster/tornado film that focuses on an average town somewhere in the midwest, USA. It’s characters are mostly regular lower-to-middle class folk – ranchers, motel staff, salon workers – with one couple being a weatherman and disaster recovery for the town. It’s a deliberately small scale (given the genre) disaster flick that doesn’t have the budget for big twister action so we largely get setup, some moments in the shelters during the storm, and then post-storm recovery and survival.

For the small scope that it has and for a certain amount of melodrama, I still enjoyed the movie well enough. It manages to generate chaos before and during the storm. They did the best they could on a tiny budget. And the aftermath of the storm was plenty strewn with rubble like you’ve seen on the news. It was convincing enough.

The characters were pretty good within their narrow scope. These aren’t storm-chasers or national disaster recovery… they are average folk dealing with average problems. Some of those problems lean towards a hint of this being a faith-based movie but I don’t think it was, at least not in a moral stand-your-ground, raise-your-flag-and-preach kind of way. In fact, some of the stories have fairly nuanced stances and conclusions that I appreciated.

Overall, this is a pretty decent little disaster film. It’s not going to challenge 2012 or San Andreas or even Twister for spectacle… it’s not that kind of flick. It’s more akin to The Impossible (the one about the tsunami) but on a much lower budget and a smaller scale. Not bad.

Score: 81