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 version of the Stephen King 1980 book Firestarter. All having 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 character. This movie is just similar, both decides to even go lower when it came to the story.

There are many rooms for creativity when it comes to adapting this novel, because the book happened over a period and happens mostly at a facility as the two Andy and Charlie were captured. The movies seem to want to flesh this up and have things happen in different locations and compress this time to make the movie watchable. Where this movie goes lower than the previous failed attempt is in the whole story. The movie tries to bring the whole incident to the present day which they believe will make the movie easier to enjoy, but that just made the movie more disjointed from the events unfolding.

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

It was from here the movie just decided to throw everything into the wind and just set itself on fire.

The movie ended very different from the book and the previous movie before it. The death of Andy is different, poorly thought through and very anticlimactic.

The whole Charlie being captured in the book is skipped and the whole making Charlie feel safe and manipulate her to using her powers does not exist instead what we have is one of the worst final acts of the movie world. Then the ending of the movie with Charlie not walking off alone back to the Mander’s farm is not in this movie, but it ends in one of the most annoying way and even insulting to the memory of Charlie’s parent.