In my recent re-watch review of the original 1984 Firestarter, I said it was an hour and forty minute buildup to the arson-heavy, fireball-spewing finale. Something I doubted the new film would handle as well due to the likely use of CGI. Well… I was maybe a little wrong about the CGI, I guess, but now the movie is an hour and twenty minute buildup to one of the biggest film whiffs I’ve seen in years.
Firestarter is based on a Stephen King novel and is about a father with psychic powers and his little girl with pyrokinetic abilities. They are on the run from a shady government organization who wants to capture and study them.
The movie stars Zac Efron’s shallow corpse and a little girl named Ryan Kiera Armstrong who might be the best little actress in the world but is saddled with a no-personality role. Nobody makes an impression in the movie, least of all the all-important father/daughter relationship that feeds the character’s motivations, emotions, and decisions. This is a real problem specially in light of them using personality-to-spare Drew Barrymore in the original (not the best acting, cute as hell anyway). Doesn’t help that Efron brings next to nothing to his role either.
The agents of the shady government organization also make no impression which is a real problem when we want to see the little girl punish them with FIRE. Kurtwood Smith makes an appearance and I was happy to see Clarence Boddicker (or Forman’s dad if you are of a later generation) in a film… but he barely shows up as just another incidental government spook.
As far as adaptations go, I don’t remember all the details of the book but I do remember the 80s film adhering better to the plot. This film makes a couple big changes to it that I think were intended to give the little girl both more agency and take away some of her culpability. It’s a cowardly change that ruins the film’s (anti) climax. We don’t care about this father/daughter team, we barely hate the bad guys, and we never got an interesting scenario for the characters to have been in in the first place.
As far as the fire effects go, they were used sparingly. The actual visual cue of the little girl setting off her power was pretty good (better than the hair-dryer effect from the original film) but the actual results were piffle. The first film gave us multiple examples of pyro and fireballs and it was cool. This film… barely tries. In fact, the girl might just use her other psychic powers more than her, you know, firestarter powers. For a film that’s building up to a moment of catharsis (and tragedy and revenge), it’s an astonishing failure.
Firestarter is a flop and failure of a flimsy film. It barely makes an effort to generate circumstances to care about, creates no bond between the family, and it blows its ending. Honestly, there are much worse movies but this one fails by not mattering at all. It’s just bland, boring, murky, and bad.
Score: 64