Firestarter, barely a flicker to start, burns out quickly
Starring Zac Efron, the latest adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel never heats up
Film Reviews Firestarter
With any subsequent adaptation, the hope is that a story improves on the version that preceded it—or at least feels as though it’s offering up a unique vision, an additional layer that makes the new adaptation purposeful in its insistence upon treading old ground. Regardless of critical assessment, recent King re-adaptations It (2017), It: Chapter 2 (2019), and Pet Semetary (2019) all did that. They felt like films that had a clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish. But the new adaptation of Firestarter, directed by Keith Thomas, has no clue what it wants to be, vacillating wildly between objectives over the course of its all-too-brief runtime. Is this one half of a television movie from 2003? Is this an extended pilot for a TV series? Is this just a means to retain rights? What it most certainly is not, to be clear, is a film that captures even a little of King’s novel.
The 1984 version of Firestarter, featuring Drew Barrymore, is no masterpiece, though it does invoke a level of nostalgia for its blend of folksy Americana and Cold War paranoia. It happens to be, at least structurally, one of the King adaptations that sticks closest to its source material. That film is directed by a filmmaker, Mark L. Lester, who would prove to have better success with action than horror. It comes as all the greater surprise that Thomas, whose low-budget Blumhouse debut The Vigil chilled audiences with an effective sense of dread, manages to make this new horror-thriller film so devoid of tension or stakes.
Firestarter starts off strong, with Andy McGee (Zac Efron) dreaming of his infant child bursting into flames. It’s a shocking jolt followed by opening credits covering flashbacks to the experimental Lot 6 trials, which heightened the latent psychic abilities of patients, including Andy and his eventual wife Vicky (Sydney Lemmon). Most of the test subjects go mad, tearing out their eyeballs, screaming in agony. As prologues go, it’s an economic use of storytelling that whets the appetite for what’s to come. Too bad the rest of the film never matches that energy.
The story picks up with 11-year-old Charlie McGee (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) struggling to keep a lid on her pyrokinetic powers. She’s the weird kid at school, depicted with shades of King’s other famed psychic, Carrie White. Her parents don’t allow her to use the internet or cell phones so that they can’t be tracked, making her a Luddite outcast among her peers. While Charlie’s mother, Vicky, has mostly given up on using her telekinetic powers, Andy uses his telepathy as an off-books, cash-only, self-help guru for clients with addiction. But there’s tension between Andy and Vicky in terms of how to raise Charlie. Vicky thinks she needs to train, to learn how to control it. Andy, meanwhile, thinks she needs to suppress, citing how his own use of powers has begun causing brain hemorrhaging—in the form of blood leaking out of his eyes. Neat trick, and an admittedly more horrific choice than the nose bleeds in the original version. The couple’s arguments about what to do with Charlie and her powers becomes repetitive, and a lot of time is spent hitting the same beats. The actors do their best with screenwriter Scott Teems’ limited, expository dialogue, but it’s hard not feel your eyelids growing heavier.
Just when it seems like things won’t pick up again, Charlie becomes angry at her parents for what they’ve made her—a monster, she says—and in a fit of rage, she ignites her mother’s arms. Andy, refusing to call 911, bandages his wife’s severe burns, and upon Vicky’s insistence, takes Charlie out for ice cream to cool her down, as one does. Charlie admits to her father that she meant to set him on fire instead. This is the kernel of an interesting idea, a shift in the devoted adoration Charlie has for her father in the novel and ’84 film. But nothing really comes of it, and the film doesn’t offer Efron the chance to explore that reaction. Andy is made to offer platitudes about not hurting things and people, and the cost of using such powers, but there’s little sense of a bond between the two.
The Shop, the government agency behind the Lot 6 trial, sets out to capture Charlie. The agency’s director, Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben), who is saddled with the film’s worst dialogue, sends retired operative John Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) to capture Charlie. She also meets with Dr. Wanless (Kurtwood Smith), who led the Lot 6 experiments, and asks him to come back—then he’s never seen again for the rest of the movie. Rainbird kills Vicky, and Andy and Charlie have so little reaction to her death that it feels almost comical. Even Rainbird, who is given telekinetic powers of his own in this iteration, seems rather uninvested in the whole situation.
Rainbird is one of King’s most horrifying villains, and his obsession with Charlie in the novel feels both religious and pedophilic; there’s just a perversive sense of unease he creates. Greyeyes, who delivered bone-chilling work in True Detective Season 3, Blood Quantum, and Wild Indian, really isn’t given much presence here. It’s a shame, because the woefully miscast George C. Scott got a lot more to work with 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 “lab rat” for the early Lot 6 experiments and used by the government as an operative, a potentially interesting storyline that substitutes the novel’s Vietnam War history for the scientific abuses of American Natives. But like so many things in this movie, that door remains closed, and Rainbird feels more like a plot device than a character.
Charlie and Andy go on the run, but in a very low-urgency sort of way that makes the film’s budget apparent. Shot behind warehouses, featuring a lack of extras, this unpopulated world is made all the blander by its mid-aughts-CBS-procedural visuals. After resting at a farm that has its own ludicrously unnecessary subplot, Andy ends up captured but Charlie escapes, making her way to The Shop via their psychic connection. Charlie also has telekinesis and telepathy, which is very much treated as an “oh, by the way” plot device as the movie deviates further and further from the novel. There’s no real sense of how long it takes Charlie to get to The Shop—it could be the next day or weeks later. When we see Andy again, he has a beard, and the plausibility of an already implausible scenario starts to sag under the weight of it all.
Somehow, with 10 minutes left in the movie, the third act starts; Charlie meets Hollister, the antagonist of the whole story, for the first time. Charlie tries to rescue her father, sets some unconvincing Shop agents on fire, and uses yet more telepathy along with her pyrokinetic powers. This movie’s flames, it must be said, are always obviously coming from a flamethrower in the least creative way possible. Nor is there enough gore or burning to earn its R rating. But at least there’s some purple and blue neon lighting in the mostly empty cement corridors of The Shop, perhaps to try to impress some ’80s nostalgia and Stranger Things kinship upon the audience. There’s no escalation here, no giant fireballs raining down havoc and destroying helicopters and the very foundations of The Shop. The film simply burns out, despite only ever being a flicker, with a sequel-bait ending that feels like a miscalculation in every sense.
The best thing that can be said about this new iteration of Firestarter is that it at least gave us a new score by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies. The rest feels like a waste of a talented cast and crew that somehow, against all odds, makes the 1984 film seem like a staggering achievement in the realm of King adaptations.
94 Comments
The TV ads i saw for this made me think it was going to be bad, and this review confirms that.But there are always people who want to see a new horror movie on Friday the 13th.
Same. Advertisers are literally the stupidest people on the planet, but in this case I’m glad the movie is actually as bad as the trailers made it look.
It’s kind of shocking in 2022 to see some pretty heavy advertising showing off what looks like sub-Syfy special effects and brutally bad kid acting, particularly since the trailer for the movie suggests a much higher level of quality.
When I heard they were doing a remake, I thought, great.
It’s one of my favorite King novels, and the Drew Barrymore one was just
really bad. But even the trailer for this makes it seem a mess.
Oh well. I’ll just reread the book.
Yeah, the trailer isn’t great, but compared to the TV spot, it looks like something directed by James Cameron:They cherry picked the cheapest looking VFX from the trailer, to the point where it feels like they’re selling it as a Sharknado-style so-bad-it’s-good movie.
The movie made it look good! Makes me wonder if they spent half of the $12 million just sprucing up the film trailer so they could get a decent opening weekend. It sounds like “cheap” was the word with this film, which isn’t surprising – Blumhouse does horror movies on a budget in exchange for greater creative freedom, which it sounds like this director didn’t particularly use well.
A surprising number of the shots in the trailer look like direct lifts from the 1984 movie.
I’m assuming most of the money was to pay for Zac Efron; it certainly wasn’t for the special effects. I fidgeted in the first half hour of this movie so much trying to keep awake.
The ads looked… dull. Like it added nothing to the original film. I guess, from the review, it did, but not in a good way.
The trailers looked so cheesy, with every actor involved chewing the scenery.
That was my reaction as well. To Richard’s point, the only thing that remains potentially interesting about the original Firestarter is from a nostalgia perspective … “oh look at baby Drew!” So remove that from the equation and … who is this for exactly?
One of the things King did really well in the novel was to beyond just standard Cold War-era distrust of the government to portray The Shop as fundamentally incompetent. It’s an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful government agency that is apparently staffed exclusively with morons, Rainbird notwithstanding. Hell, the entire plot of the novel only happens because The Shop has the family under completely effective and secret surveillance, only to wildly overreact when Charlie sleeps over at a friend’s house by brutally torturing and murdering her mom. It’s a nice little twist.
And he has the decency to give a good explanation for why the Shop is staffed with so many idiots, as they’re completely unemployable by anyone else.
I especially liked how in the book, the blackout at the Shop was caused unbeknownst to everyone in the story by a congressman kicking back a contract to supply the generators for the facility when it was being built and surprise surprise, they were shoddy.
“It happens to be, at least structurally, one of the King adaptations that sticks closest to its source material.”Begging the question why SO many writers and directors insist on completely altering King’s stories. The guy’s the most successful horror writer ever for a reason, FFS.
Part of it is an accident of timing. If he was as big today as he was in the ‘80s, he’d have the kind of contract JK Rowling and other big authors tend to get, with script and director approval. Back in the ‘80s Hollywood wasn’t at all concerned with faithful adaptations, and a lot of the time, they just wanted to be able to slap “Based on Stephen King’s…” on any old story for a promotional push. (I think King had to sue the makers of Lawnmower Man because literally the only thing they took from his story was the title).The other part is that King is hard to adapt, with a lot of internal dialogue and narrative. His books are long, which is probably why many of his most successful adaptations are short stories or novellas. Once a screenwriter is invited to cut down your work, and not required to be particularly faithful to it, they start getting their own ideas on how to improve it, even if you’re the master of horror and they’re not.
Fair point, he obviously optioned many of these a long time ago (Firestarter a good example). I’m old enough to remember the Lawnmower Man movie coming out and wondering how the hell they were going to turn that tiny little weird-ass story into a movie. Easy – ditch everything but the title!
The other part is that King is hard to adapt, with a lot of internal dialogue and narrative. Especially Firestarter. A huge part of the first third is Andy delivering exposition by way of haunted memories. (And beautifully delivered—I love the line “voices in an empty room.” Firestarter is one of my favorite King novels, I’m not sure why so many critics dismiss it.)
Lawnmower Man has the title, and the abusive dad nextdoor to Pierce Brosnan’s house has the same name as the main character of the novel, though I don’t think they ever say his whole name, it’s just in the credits.
One could account for the internal dialogue and excessive world-building without completely changing the story; these wild changes from the source material, without creating a better story, is what it is frustrating about so many King adaptations.
He’s a good writer of horror novels, but a lot of his novels don’t translate well to live-action adaptations without heavy changes. A lot of his novels turn on what’s happening inside the characters’ heads.
No self-respecting moviegoer wants to see children have an orgy.
“Congressman Gaetz is on line two…”
The Langoliers is probably the most accurate of Stephen King’s work in trying to follow the content of the source material.
Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and The Green Mile were all great, too.
Just look at the Kubrick Shining vs the “King approved” Shining to see why.
See also King Approved Children of the Corn vs the original.https://cinematicdiversions.com/children-of-the-corn-2009-review/Children of the Corn (2009): 1 out of 10: Good lord did they screw this movie up. First, the writer (George Goldsmith) who adapted the original Children of the Corn is some sort of savant. All the good scenes in the original movie (The killing of the adults, Isaac and Malachi going at it in the climax, were his invention.) This movie cut all that good stuff out and replaced it with the Viet Cong and public child sex.The blame rests squarely on Mr. Stephen King’s shoulders. He did not like the changes the 1984 film adaptation and wanted to stick to his original story. Therefore, the movie takes place in the mid-seventies and the main couple is a divorcing, squabbling mess. Also, the main character hallucinates Viet Cong shooting in the corn which looks ten times worse than it sounds. Oh, they have a sex scene in a church “The time for fertilization has come!” where two teens have sex while nine-year-olds look on masturbating corncobs…. good lord, I didn’t need to see that.
Because he was an alcoholic and drug addict? Seriously, by far the best King adaptation was Kubrick’s The Shining, which King hated. Because he hated that somebody with actual talent improved the source material. See also The Godfather, made from an absolute shit novel.
I don’t think he improved the source material, exactly. He made huge changes to it. I understand why King hates the adaptation–it changes some of the most personal things about the book, as well as Jack’s narrative arc. (Personally, my beef with the film is how Kubrick conceives Wendy and how he directs Shelley Duvall.) But, I also think it’s a prime example of a writer being too close to his own work to evaluate an adaptation fairly. I like the Kubrick Shining, but I don’t know that I would call it a good adaptation of the book.
Also, believe it or not, Forrest Gump.
Last week I finally got around to watching John Carpenter’s version of Christine, a movie I probably didn’t get around to for decades because of it’s critical reputation, which turned out to be underserved. That’s one where Carpenter vastly improved on the source material in my opinion, being able to completely avoid the 1st person limited/3rd person omniscient narrative shift King resorted to because he (I believe by his own admission) couldn’t figure out how to tell the story, and skipping one of the novel’s sillier subplots about Christine’s previous owner being some kind of half-baked Satanist or something in favor of the car just being born bad.Weirdly, I think it gets overlooked as a stronger Stephen King adaptation because it’s a weaker John Carpenter movie. Which is also unfair insofar as it’s a decent JC movie, it just has the misfortune of following The Thing (on the shortlist for Carpenter’s masterpiece) and falling in amongst Carpenter’s ‘70s-’80s run of great or indelible movies.Coincidentally, I re-watched the last 2/3 of Misery earlier the same day. Which held up.All of which left me wondering if maybe we undercount the number of decent King adaptations. Yes, some of them are awful, but Carrie is pretty great, Misery is great, Christine is great. I’m not a fan of Kubrick’s Shining but I respect the work that went into it and it undeniably has a solid reputation (and while I don’t like it as a movie, there’s undeniably some great filmmaking; e.g. I love that in the scene where Jack knocks down the door, Kubrick tracks the axe head where a hundred other directors would’ve made it a static shot).Anyway, I mostly came by to say that people always seem to forget about Christine when the topic of good King adaptations comes up.
Because no one wants to see fear-based spider-monsters defeated by a tween orgy.
You sure you’re not just mad that it stars a white male and it isn’t a metaphor for climate change?
Wait, is that little girl a white male? Damn, he’s one fine actor! I really believed that he was a little girl.
Ah, must be the weekend. The reactionary “anti-woke” shit-gibbons are here.
Hush now, the grownups are talking.
Yeah, but they’re not making a lot of sense.
Is it an effort to be this stupid and unpleasant, or are you just naturally gifted?
Lol what the fuck are you on about?
The real question is does it have the Prodigy song in it or some cover of it?
“Flame Igniter” by Smart Guy
Don’t you remember the trailer?
*Single, over-reverbed note plays on piano
[slow, eery vocals] “I’m the bitch you hated, filth infatuated”
*camera zooms out to reveal an 8 year old girl
Now sung to the minor-key version of “Ring around the Rosy”
You mean the pre-Internet online service run by Sears?
Technically Sears, CBS and IBM. My old man worked for big blue so we had Prodigy for years when all the cool kids had AOL
At least it wasn’t 2400 baud dial up from my dad’s work. All the cool kids in Columbus, OH had CompuServe. We used the CD’s that AOL mailed nearly every day (or with the paper…you remember newspapers??) for cups.
The fact that the advertisements for this barely showed Zac Efron—a flicker of his fine face, if I remember correctly—tells me they already knew how bad it was and just sort of threw that blitz together hopelessly.I wish the child actor well, but I’m not sure based on what I saw that she was ready to carry a feature. Then again what do I know.
I was reading some other reactions and someone actually asked how much Efron is in it because he’s barely in the trailer.The reply was he’s in it quite a bit surprisingly. Still that trailer really does look cheap as hell.
“Flicker”, good one.
What a shame. This was the first book – Stephen King or otherwise – that I literally could not put down during the last few chapters (I was in 8th grade I think), but my high hopes were dashed with the 1984 version. Like a lot of King adaptations, it sure sounds like it should be a no-brainer to make the source material into a great movie in the right hands… but here we are.
It’s the first Stephen King book that I enjoy reading more than once. I also reread The Stand, but others freak me out too much on the first reading. I don’t need that kind of stress.
I WOULD piss on it just to put it out!
A Deadzone remake would be timely.
They’d have to tweak the ending though, it’s simply not believable anymore that people wouldn’t vote for Stillson just because he used a baby as a human shield.
It’d probable win him the election.
The book was… not strong. Readable, but not very compelling. It was never going to make a good movie without some real special talent by the script writers and directors. Hence, the first movie was “meh.”
And they blew it again? Meh. But I guess a new generation needs to see this?
Is it as good as Dreamcatcher? Because that was an *excellent* Stephen King movie!
/s
Not as good and Maximum Overdrive.
The only movie ever partially directed by a sentient mound of cocaine
I’m pretty sure it’s not the only one, just because the 80s happened, it’s just the most obvious.
I really don’t get all the hate on Maximum Overdrive. Yes, it’s not great, but it’s better than at least half of the Stephen King movies. And it’s a chance to see Yeardely Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson) in a live-action role.
I read the book years after watching the movie, and I honestly think the movie might be better. At least the movie has that helicopter scene and Morgan Freeman.
Helicopter scene was better in the book. Was about the only decent part of the book. The friend group has like 1/10th the charm of the Losers or the Boulder Free Zone group, and the movie can’t even get that right despite like 2.9 of the 4 actors being really good.
There is no way to make a good movie out of that pile of dreck, and I’ve read every Stephen King novel so when I tell you Dreamcatcher is bad, I say it with authority.
If you remember that he wrote in the hospital with a pencil while blasted on Oxycodone, it makes a bit more sense
i really disliked “insomnia.”
Insomnia is decidedly not his best work, but I maintain that it was better than Dreamcatcher. There were no shitweasels involved.
the ass weasel!
I feel certain there is a lot of Stephen King material that has never been adapted, so why they keep re-doing stories is lost on me. Except for, you know, money.
So then, not lost on you at all as you clearly know the correct answer. 🙂
Could be a rights issue? They can remake older ones for cheaper, and with little to no input from King? Rather than have to pay more (and have him involved) for something they don’t already have the rights to.
Stephen King does let student and up and coming filmmakers make films of his work that he has control over for $1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_Baby#:~:text=The%20Dollar%20Baby%20(or%20Dollar,retains%20rights%20to%20his%20work.
so we’re just getting the same garbage king adaptations of old, good news!
The budget is the big problem here. They picked the King story about pyrokinesis, but only gave it a budget of $12 million* to work with. That would require a lot of creativity when it comes to special effects to make cheap effects look more expensive, and it sounds like they didn’t deliver. Blumhouse might have just been the wrong studio for this one. There are plenty of good King adaptations that can be made for $12 million or less, but not this one.* That’s the same budget that the 1984 film had 38 years ago, which would be the equivalent of $34 million now (IE about the same as It Part 1).
One really eerie part of the book is that it has a raging misogynist (who you’d swear was a deliberate knock on incels if the book wasn’t a few decades too early for that) named OJ, who even insists on being nicknamed Juice. Yeah, I can see why the movie apparently decided to ditch that part.
Who was, as I recall from my reading of the novel many years ago, an interesting and compelling villain along the lines of Harold Lauder in The Stand. Deleting him make the bad guys a lot less threatening. And watering down Rainbird by making him a victim of The Shop too is effing lame. Moot point anyway, I opted out of this one after watching the trailer. Did not seem like a quality product in any way. Plus I don’t know that I could watch two hours of Zac Efron’s overly manicured, overly pretty hair and beard.
When can we finally get a sick pyrokinetic rampage that lasts at least a third of the movie? Show me the charred corpses, let me hear the screaming, and then show me what the survivors look like. I miss Sypha.
Boy movies really like to fuck with eyes, tearing them out, they’re bleeding, the eyelids are heavy and gre yeyes, whatever they are. Eyes are like helicopters in movies; they’re not going to make it to the end of the movie without something really bad happening to them. 👀
What about girl movies? And this one stars a girl, so…
They don’t have helicopters, they have horses.
The best thing about the trailer was that low-fi synthwave John Carpenter homage track playing over it. And even that wasn’t that great.
Homage? He did the music with his son!
He did the music for the film proper with his son, but the music on the trailer was trailer stock music.It was on some of the trailers for Eternals as well IIRC.
My mistake then! But honestly not bad for generic trailer music then.
this mfer said “perversive”
I mean this first Firestarter was not very good either. It’s got really “made for TV” energy despite being a theatrical release. It also included George C Scott playing a Native American. It’s not a good look
Which was really bizarre. I mean even ignoring the debates over whether actors should play ethnicites they aren’t, what made the casting director think “yes, George C. Scott would be *perfect* for this role?”
Synth music can be awesome, but ever since Stranger Things, they’ve been commercializing it too much. This film thinks that by using a synth style soundtrack it’ll stand out and be trendy.
Is every fucking review I read about this going to mention the “horrible mis-casting” of George C. Scott in the original? He had a ponytail. I didn’t even know the character was SUPPOSED to be Indian. Y’all act like that muther fucker did some Mickey Rooney/Breakfast at Tiffany’s shit. Please don’t watch “Little Big Man” or “Hombre”. Your head might explode from the virtue signaling.
No one was going to watch those either. And way to conveniently forget the metric fuckton of bronzer they put on him. Never before has George C. Scott looked so George Hamilton-y.
This was a flaccid piece of nothing. All these recent King adaptations aren’t even bad, they’re just mlllehhh.I would rather get schlock like The Mangler and The Night Flier than this
You’re telling me that the John Carpenter music Score was an improvement over the original Tangerine dream synth score. Seriously! I mean that entire new version was a shit show and there wasn’t one thing in it that was better than the original, and that goes for the the entire music score as well.
I think you hit the nail on the head, I think this was probably intended to be a TV series and then they changed their minds. It looks more like a network television show than a feature film in 2022.
This continues a lazy lazy lazy horror trend of setting movies in the present day, but with heavy 80s styling. It’s an attempt to evoke nostalgia without actually making a period piece. The McGee’s house and car are so thoroughly 80s that it was shocking when someone picked up a cell phone.