There’s no denying that Reed Timmer, the main tornado-chasing subject of the new documentary “Never Stop Chasing” (in theaters), runs on pure adrenaline. He drives at top speed toward the most dangerous storms, filming with his phone, hollering and whooping. And his buddies in the field acknowledge that even now, in his mid-40s, he seems to be trying to outrun the clock: “He can’t take time off,” one says. “He’s just going to do whatever it takes to keep pushing forward.”
Pushing forward, in this case, means pursuing extreme weather across Middle America, filming tornadoes and broadcasting the footage. For Timmer and his crew, it also means studying the phenomena, advocating for preparedness measures and, sometimes, helping with search and rescue after a storm whips through a community, wreaking havoc on people’s lives.
Timmer has been at this since college in the late 1990s. Eventually he and his crew were highlighted in the Discovery reality show “Storm Chasers.” They dubbed themselves Team Dominator, after the armored car they drive. (Timmer was an inspiration for Glen Powell’s character in the 2024 film “Twisters,” and brought the screenwriter Mark L. Smith along on a chase.)
The director Ken Cole structures “Never Stop Chasing” partly as a profile of Timmer and Team Dominator, partly as just an extended look at some truly wild footage. The profile is more factual than insightful; the most intriguing peek into Timmer’s psychology comes from his mother, who notes that her son was very afraid of thunderstorms when he was a toddler, but the “fear became a fascination once he started to learn about” extreme weather. But most of us don’t chase storms nor want to, and there’s not much here to illuminate what’s going on in the heads of people obsessed with something so dangerous.
Around the halfway mark, though, the film transitions from filling in Timmer’s back story to letting us ride along on several chases. (At one point, a photojournalist for The New York Times Magazine hitches a ride in the back seat of the Dominator for a 2024 piece.) And you start to understand: There’s a strange, terrifying beauty to these funnels, which the team has to hold in balance with the destruction they wreak.
Connor McCrorey, who’s been riding with Team Dominator since he was a teenager, recounts through tears his experience finding a 5-year-old girl in the aftermath of a 2014 Nebraska tornado and holding her hand as she died: “The dark side of what we do, it comes with the territory, and I’m really good at compartmentalizing,” he says.
There’s one more layer to the documentary that’s unexpectedly reminiscent of the latest installment in the “Jackass” series. While the team’s research can help save lives, tornado chasing is also obviously, by most measures, foolhardy. Some of the men have been hunting storms together since they were in their 20s, so they’re not just obsessives but also close friends. They’ve stared death in the face over the years while developing a shorthand with one another. You might say the most beautiful part of the movie doesn’t really have to do with storms at all. It’s watching a crew of men who grew up together doing something crazy, obviously enjoying being together and caring for one another, waiting for the next storm to develop.
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