Zac Efron and Ryan Kiera Armstrong in Firestarter Image: Ken Warner / Universal Pictures
With each subsequent adaptation, the hope is that a story will improve on the version that preceded it – or at least it feels as if it offers a unique vision, an additional layer that makes the new adaptation focused on insisting on the old ground. Despite critical acclaim, recent re-adaptations of King It (2017), It: Chapter 2 (2019) and Pet Semetary (2019) have done so. They felt like films that had a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve. But the new Firestarter adaptation, directed by Keith Thomas, has no idea what it wants to be, swaying wildly between targets during its very short run time. Is this half of a 2003 TV movie? Is this an advanced pilot for a TV series? Is this just a means of preserving rights? What is certainly not, to be clear, is a film that captures even a little of King’s novel.
The 1984 Firestarter version, starring Drew Barrymore, is not a masterpiece, although it evokes a level of nostalgia for the mix of American American folk and Cold War paranoia. It happens, at least structurally, to be one of King’s adaptations that sticks closest to its source material. This film was directed by Mark L. Lester, who would prove to be more successful with action than horror. An even bigger surprise is that Thomas, whose low-budget debut on Blumhouse The Vigil froze audiences with an effective sense of fear, managed to make this new horror-thriller film so stress-free or bet-free.
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Firestarter
In the role
Zack Efron, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Sidney Lehmann, Carthwood Smith, John Beasley, Michael Grace, Gloria Ruben
Availability
Theaters everywhere May 13; Peacock 13 May
Firestarter starts strong, with Andy McGee (Zac Efron) dreaming of his baby bursting into flames. It was a shocking shock, followed by initial credits covering retrospectives of Lot 6’s experimental trials, which boosted the latent mental abilities of patients, including Andy and his eventual wife, Vicki (Sidney Lemon). Most of the subjects go crazy, rip out their eyeballs, scream in agony. As the prologues go, the economic use of storytelling whets the appetite for what lies ahead. It is a pity that the rest of the film never corresponds to this energy.
The story begins with 11-year-old Charlie McGee (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who struggles to keep a lid on his pyrokinetic powers. She is the strange child in school, portrayed with nuances of King’s other famous psychic, Carrie White. Her parents do not allow her to use the Internet or mobile phones so that they cannot be traced, which makes her a mad exile among her peers. While Charlie’s mother, Vicki, has mostly given up using her telekinetic powers, Andy uses his telepathy as a self-help guru for clients addicted to books, just for cash. But there is tension between Andy and Vicki over how to raise Charlie. Vicky thinks she needs to train, learn how to control it. Andy, meanwhile, thinks she should suppress, citing how his own use of force has begun to cause bleeding in the brain – in the form of blood flowing from his eyes. Great trick and, of course, more terrifying choice than nosebleeds in the original version. The couple’s arguments about what to do with Charlie and her strength become recurring and a lot of time is spent hitting the same punches. The actors do their best with limited, exposing dialogue to screenwriter Scott Teams, but it’s hard not to feel your eyelids getting heavy.
Just when it looks like things won’t get better again, Charlie gets angry with his parents for what they did to her – a monster, she says – and in a fit of rage she sets her mother’s hands on fire. Andy, refusing to call 911, bandages his wife’s severe burns and, at Vicky’s insistence, takes Charlie out for ice cream to cool her, as one does. Charlie admits to his father that she wanted to set him on fire instead. This is the core of an interesting idea, a change in the devotional adoration that Charlie feels for his father in the ’84 novel and film. But nothing really comes of it, and the film does not offer Efron the opportunity to explore this reaction. Andy is made to offer banal words about not hurting things and people, as well as the cost of using such forces, but there is no sense of connection between the two.
The store, the government agency behind the Lot 6 trial, is set to capture Charlie. The agency’s director, Captain Hollister (Gloria Ruben), who is in charge of the worst dialogue in the film, sends retired operative John Rainbird (Michael Grace) to capture Charlie. She also meets with Dr. Wonles (Kurtwood Smith), who leads Lot 6’s experiments, and begs him to return – after which he never sees again until the end of the film. Rainbird kills Vicki, and Andy and Charlie have such a weak reaction to her death that it looks almost comical. Even Rainbird, who has been given its own telekinetic forces in this iteration, seems rather uninvested in the whole situation.
Rainbird is one of King’s most terrifying villains, and his obsession with Charlie in the novel feels both religious and pedophile; there is just a perverse feeling of anxiety that it creates. The gray eyes that did a chilling job in True Detective Season 3, Blood Quantum and Wild Indian are really not very present here. It’s a pity, because the terribly wrongly chosen George C. Scott had a lot more to do in the ’84 version (while uncomfortably posing as an American Indian). This Firestarter tries to paint Rainbird in a sympathetic light, revealing that he was a “laboratory rat” for the early Lot 6 experiments and used by the government as an operative, a potentially interesting storyline that replaces the Vietnam War story of the science novel. abuses of Native Americans. But like many things in this movie, this door remains closed and Rainbird feels more like a plot device than a character.
Michael Graces in FirestarterImage: Ken Warner / Universal Pictures
Charlie and Andy run away, but in a very low urgency, which makes the film’s budget obvious. Shot behind warehouses, with no extras, this uninhabited world is made softer by its mid-level CBS procedures. After resting on a farm that has its own absurdly unnecessary plot, Andy is captured, but Charlie escapes, making his way to the Store through their psychic connection. Charlie also has telekinesis and telepathy, which are much treated as “oh, by the way” plot device, as the film deviates more and more from the novel. There’s no real sense of how long it takes Charlie to get to The Shop – maybe the next day or weeks later. When we see Andy again, he has a beard and the credibility of an already implausible scenario begins to fall under the weight of it all.
Somehow there are 10 minutes left in the movie, the third act begins; Charlie meets Hollister, the antagonist of the whole story, for the first time. Charlie tries to save his father, sets fire to some unconvincing Shop agents, and uses even more telepathy along with her pyrokinetic powers. The flames of this film, it must be said, always obviously come from a flamethrower in the least creative way possible. Nor is there enough blood or burns to earn your R rating. But at least there’s a little purple and blue neon lighting in the mostly empty cement corridors of The Shop, perhaps to try to impress some 80s nostalgia and kinship with Stranger. Things on the audience. There is no escalation here, no giant fireballs that wreak havoc and destroy helicopters and the very foundations of The Shop. The film just burns, even though it’s once just a flicker, with an ending lure for a sequel that feels like a mistake in every sense.
The best that can be said about this new iteration of Firestarter is that it at least gave us a new result from John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel A. Davis. The rest feels like the loss of a talented cast and crew, which somehow makes the 1984 film look like a stunning achievement in King’s adaptations.
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