Firestarter (2022)

Firestarter (2022)

 2/10

Starring

Zac Efron

Ryan Kiera Armstrong

Sydney Lemmon

 

Directed by Keith Thomas

 

The movie makes some attempts to improve on the 1984 movie adaptation of Stephen King's 1980 book Firestarter. Both share the same name, but both movies still fail to be fun. I recall not totally falling for the 1984 adaptation, which had a boring story with no compelling characters. This movie is similar and even decides to go lower when it comes to the story.

There is a lot of room for creativity when adapting this novel, because the book spans a period and mostly takes place at a facility where Andy and Charlie were captured. The movies seem to want to flesh this up and have things happen in different locations, compressing the timeline to make the movie more watchable. Where this movie goes lower than the previous failed attempt is in the story. The movie tries to bring the whole incident into the present day, believing it will make the movie easier to enjoy, but that just made it more disjointed from the events unfolding.

The story is about a family with different powers. The parents were volunteers for a clinical trial that gave the couple different supernatural powers at low levels. The mother had telekinetic abilities, and the father (Andy – Zac Efron) had telepathy. Their child (Charlie), on the other hand, had pyrokinetic powers—the ability to control fire. She can shoot fire out of her and set things far from her on fire. Her powers are growing, but she lacks control. The people who conducted this experiment on the couple want Charlie. They want to control her power and study her, which forces the family to always be on the run. But Charlie has episodes of losing control of her powers, which send out heat signals that the bad guys can track. The couple tries to escape, but they are tracked down, and the mother is killed.

From here, the movie just decides to throw everything into the wind and set itself on fire.

The movie ends very differently from the book and the previous movie adaptation. The death of Andy is poorly thought through, anticlimactic, and disappointing.

The entire sequence of Charlie being captured in the book is skipped, and the whole aspect of making Charlie feel safe and manipulating her into using her powers doesn’t exist. Instead, what we have is one of the worst final acts in movie history. The ending of the movie, with Charlie not walking off alone back to the Mander farm, is not in this movie. It ends in one of the most annoying ways, even insulting the memory of Charlie’s parents.