Firestarter

Lately when I watch a new movie, I ask myself "how would this movie be without it's special effects?". Too many movies get by on shiney and sparkley colors on the screen for a large part of the movie.

If you do that here, you don't even have an average movie.

What happened to Hollywood in terms of smart writing? I'd throw acting in there too, but I think it's unfair to judge actors when they have the scripts and writing they're dealing with now. I'm not even sure how they can say many of the lines with a straight face, so that's impressive I guess.

If you literally have nothing else to do, this would be ok to have on in the background.

Right, well this was a fully and wholly unnecessary remake of the 1984 movie of the same name.

As I stumbled upon this 2022 movie from writer Scott Teems and director Keith Thomas, I have to admit that my immediate thought was 'oh no, another unnecessary remake, just like the 2015 remake of "Poltergeist"'. Yet I opted to sit down and watch the movie, and actually give director Keith Thomas a fair chance with this 2022 version of "Firestarter".

But as I just said above, "Firestarter" was a very unnecessary remake, and if you have seen the 1984 classic with Drew Barrymore, David Keith, Heather Locklear, Martin Sheen and George C. Scott, then you can easily skip on the 2022 version, believe you me.

Sure, if you are unfamiliar with the 1984, then there is some entertainment value to the 2022 "Firestarter", no doubt about it. But for us that have seen the original, then this movie was just water under the bridge.

The 2022 movie stars Zac Efron and Ryan Kiera Armstrong. I can't fathom why they opted for Efron for this movie, but Armstrong was actually nicely cast. The movie also have some good performances from veterans such as Kurtwood Smith, John Beasley, Gloria Reuben and Michael Greyeyes.

Visually then "Firestarter" was nice, of course it was, given it is special effects and CGI made in 2022. But that doesn't alleviate the fact that "Firestarter" is a redundant movie.

My rating of this watered-down remake lands on a bland five out of ten stars.

I don't think I've ever seen the Drew Barrymore version of this Stephen King story, nor have I read the book, so I honestly can't tell you if this lived up to either of those. What I can say is that, despite some interesting flourishes, mostly this is a pedestrian adventure and I'm not sure who the target audience is.

Charlie McGee (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is a young girl with a supernatural power, when upset, she can generate an intense and destructive fire that she is impervious too. An incident at her school exposes her to a government agency that would like to bring her in for experimentation, one that has a dark history of dealing with people with powers. As her mother Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) and father Andy (Zac Efron) try to get her to safety, another powered individual Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) is on their trail.

Blumhouse Studios has quite the history of successfully soft rebooting horror films now and their success with "The Invisible Man" is plastered all over the advertising for this one, unfortunately it's not telling anything like as interesting or relevant of a story. Dangerous power in the (relatively) unstable hands of a child is a familiar plot but here it's crowbarred into a low rent revenge action film, if anything - desperately lacking in scares, or invention, to make the experience worthwhile.

I did like the 80's aesthetic. Though it didn't extend to the actual setting, the typeface and style of the credit sequences are retro inspired and interesting, and there's a John (and Cody) Carpenter provided score, which is full of the sort of synthetic sounds that he's know for. I also can't actively criticise the performances of anyone involved, though by the same token, nobody particularly stands out. The visual effects are fine, if a bit toned down for what they might have been.

It's just all in service of a story that's not very interesting. I know it's not a horror story in the way some other King narratives are, but it's desperately lacking in any sort of thrills.

Many adaptations of Stephen King novels exist--on film or television--that aren't very good. It is quite frankly just really, really difficult to translate masterful textual stories onto the big screen. But even amidst that mediocrity, Firestarter might be the worst effort I've ever beheld.

For a very basic overview, Firestarter tells the story of young Charlie McGee (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), a girl imbued with pyro-kinetic mental abilities--in other words, the ability to create/control fire. Hidden away from society by a father (Zac Efron) & mother (Sydney Lemmon) who perpetuated her condition as part of a collegiate experiment, they are eventually found out and pursued by a shadowy government agency and mercenary Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) in particular.

Skipping right to the point, 2022's Firestarter intentionally undercuts everything that makes the novel retain any sort of iconic status. Some examples:

-The Lot Six experiment flashbacks (with college-age Mr. & Mrs. McGee) are some of the most compelling material in the book. Here? Relegated to opening-credit background filler.

-The tension between whether or not Charlie should train herself to control her special abilities? Used in a couple of 30-second snippets and then discarded entirely.

-One of the book's hallmarks was the separation (over a long period of time) of Charlie and her beloved father, which sets up a perfect slow-burn to the explosive climax. That isn't even attempted here--instead, all that material is laughable condensed into the film's final 15-20 minutes.

I am very rarely tempted to stoop to 1-star level on any entertainment property, but this movie came dangerously close. The only reason I even bumped it up to 2-stars? Because Efron was perfectly cast and would have been perfect for his role, had not the entire thing around him been a flame-out (pardon the pun).

In short, Firestarter is simply a hollowed-out vehicle for utilizing the King name (and, oddly enough, a John Carpenter-and-son score) to get a few eyeballs. I hate being that crass, but this film deserves it. Not one ounce of care was put into the crafting of interesting characters or plot pacing.

I should have known better than to be the least bit excited for this. This was bad. The original, was one of my favorite movies when I was young. I was hoping they improved on that. I don't know why. With the exception of Dune (as that's all that comes to mind right now) remakes have traditionally been bad, overall. I don't know why I thought this would be any different. They did very little marketing before it was out. Which is usually an indication that they don't even have faith in their own movie. I should have known better.