Written by Ryan Dailey
In the world of film, most of the time one can turn off their minds and the story projected before them can allow them to sit there for the duration of the run time and let them be mindlessly entertained. As a film reviewer, I do not have that luxury.
Firestarter is a remake of the 1984 movie based on the 1980 book by Stephen King. The film does little more than try to cash in on nostalgia and an IP, its saving grace being the John Carpenter score.
Written by Scott Reems,(Halloween Kills) Firestarter follows Charlie, a young girl that can manifest fire through thought, her telepathic father and telekinetic mother. The McGee clan is on the run from a shifty government agency looking to experiment and study them, all while Charlie tries to understand her budding powers.
The characters in Firestarter are severely two dimensional, never once exploring the moral gray area of Zac Effron’s character using his telepathy to brainwash people for money under the guise of a self-help coach using hypnosis.Or basically conning a kind old man with mind tricks for a ride, food and shelter. Even the story of Charlie is not really fleshed out, making her merely a vessel to get from one terribly rendered fire visual effect to the next.
There was such a missed opportunity here to explore the effects on nature versus nurture and the effect on how parenting affects a child’s mental state. Instead, we get dialog that seems like it was composed at the writer’s desk at SYFY.
Stories about children with powers and either the ability or the inability to control them should be terrifying. Look at Twilight Zone: The Movie, The episode The Good Life in which a young boy with the ability to manifest anything he desires with his mind holds a whole town under his thumb. THAT was how to do a terrifying child horror story.
Firestarter is a film that is good for background noise, especially after one viewing. There are worse remakes in the world, but there are also much better ones. If you have a penchant for revisiting the old days through a new lens, give this movie a view.
I can not guarantee that you are going to like what you see.
Firestarter is playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.