Firestarter (2022)

½ star
Firestarter is slow burn torture. The actors display no conviction. They recite their lines woodenly and walk around as if wading through quicksand while wearing concrete boots. The victims of psychic attacks react like pod people. The tepid direction looks to have been inspired by Albert Pyun. The villains appear bored. The climactic firefight has all the excitement of a fireplace screensaver. I expected more from Blumhouse Productions, which has established a good reputation for decent horror movies. Taking the 1984 Stephen King adaptation and passing it through the Blumhouse sausage factory should have yielded better results, but instead we get a movie that fails not spectacularly but in whimpering fashion.

Like in the original film, Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) volunteered for an evil experiment that bestowed upon them psychic powers. After the experiments, they get married and produce a daughter, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who can set fires with her mind, though she is untamed, and her talent wreaks havoc if not kept in check. The McGee family is now in hiding, since the company would love to get its hands on Charlie and harness her abilities. Andy and Vicky disagree on how they should raise Charlie. Zac says she should suppress her powers, while Vicky thinks they should train her so that she doesn't accidentally hurt someone. Jane Hollister (Gloria Reuben), the head of the facility, hires hitman John Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) to locate the family and bring in Charlie. Rainbird himself is a former test subject, with psychic powers that can withstand the two McGee parents.

After the first encounter with Rainbird, it's just Andy and Charlie. Andy can "push" people to do his bidding, but his talent has weakened him over the years to the point that he bleeds from his eyes. He can only do this a few more times. Meanwhile, Charlie is barely able to control herself. At a shockingly quick 94 minutes, the movie is determined to get to the end and put itself out of its misery, a trope that Charlie literally applies twice when she burns a cat and later a guy in his car. Agents capture Andy and take him to headquarters, leaving Charlie on her own to practice her skills by starting a campfire before she feels she's ready to take on armed men. Before she does, she confronts three kids who taunt her and, using mind control (a huge departure from the original), takes a bike, a sandwich and I think convinces one kid to drop his pants to humiliate him. Curiously, the three actors don't seem enthusiastic about bullying her, as if they just didn't have it within themselves to play mean kids.

That's enough of that. Let's get right to the comparisons, which this movie inevitably invites due to execution so poor it makes the original look like a masterpiece. Zac Efron and Ryan Kiera Armstrong never develop as a father and daughter placed under heavy duress. They give the material all the gravitas of a bad mockbuster. Compare that to David Keith and Drew Barrymore from the original. That movie, which was longer, dedicated ample time to allow scenes of bonding between the fugitive father and daughter. Their situation felt urgent, because the villains (played by Martin Sheen and George C. Scott) had more screentime to explain themselves and plot against Andy. This made their separation an anxious affair. Their eventual reunion was emotionally charged and provided the perfect segue to Charlie's climactic battle against their captors. When she did her damage, it came from a place deep down, where she was injured not just by losing her father but also from betrayal. Someone she trusted lied to her, so she targeted the entire system that inflicted so much grief on her and her family. It was a very satisfying conclusion.

Zac Efron's Andy does little beyond telling Charlie what to do. This is really the fault of screenwriter Scott Teems, who failed to give this story any scope or imagination. His script carries over few recognizable plot points from Stephen King's novel and makes up the rest, yet his own additions can barely sustain the movie. I normally have an easy time collecting my thoughts in preparation for a negative review, but Firestarter is a curious beast. It's such an empty vessel that to analyze it presents a unique challenge. Charlie sets a few fires, her father reprimands her, and there you have it. Rainbird often keeps his distance, and not just from the McGees. We get the idea that he's doing this job against his will, but his backstory is barely addressed. Hollister is a laughable villain. When threatened near the end, there's no urgency in her actions. She selects a human shield for protection, though she displays little fear for her life. Nearly every scene has this quality. The characters don't seem eager to do anything. The whole project has an aura of noncommitment from everybody.

Ryan Kiera Armstrong is the only person who has any presence, though that's largely because she screams when she sets things ablaze. Imagine sitting in front of a fire and you threw wads of paper into it instead of getting up to add more logs, and you have the perfect image of what it must have been like on set. To be fair, the book's showdown between Charlie and her captors was anticlimactic. The original movie added much of the action, like her ability to shoot fireballs and her resistance to bullets. Her slow march through the compound while destroying vehicles and attacking agents was an ending well earned, yet the book's ending was open to interpretation. Rather than give us something memorable, the Blumhouse team threw together this hasty ending. Here, Charlie's walk to freedom is characteristic of the whole movie: She dispatches a dozen agents in a cramped hallway. There's no sense of some powerful conspiracy that harassed her family for so many years. With such a half-assed effort behind it, Firestarter should have stayed on the shelf indefinitely.

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