Stars: Zac Efron, Sydney Lemmon
Budget: $12 million
Directed By: Keith Thomas
Another classic remade by the mighty horror moguls at Blumhouse pictures. Following their footsteps of invisible man they've taken the Stephen King novel Firestarter. Last handled way back in 1984 and starred a very young Drew Barrymore as the center stage Charlie Mcgee.
I've watched the Original but not for like 20 years, it's also one the very few King books I haven't actually read, so can't make any comparisons there. What I do know is this leans very much more into the psychic powers aspect that the original didn't though. Zac Efron plays the father and I totally didn't recognise him in the trailer and only realised when my friend pointed it out. He's looking more like Rylan Clark lately. The acting isn't one of the bad points in this though, but we'll get onto the bad points later.
Seems that John Carpenter is getting comfortable with Blumhouse lately too. What with the Halloween redo, now doing the music for this. Though this is in no way a bad thing. In fact the music is pretty banging in this film, alleviating some parts of the movie from drab to good.
I felt certain part of this movie that were meant to be shocking or hitting came across totally opposite. Like the scene where the clearly fake baby bursting into flames in the dad's dream at the beginning. People actually laughed in the cinema too. I usually can't handle babies in danger in films, for personal reasons, it even didn't trigger me.
There's a scene where Charlie sets fire to her mother's arms, now they know about her powers by the way. She just stares at her arms in flames until the dad puts them out, WHY put your arms out ffs don't just stand there, don't blame 'surprise' either, like I said she knows. One more scene is where Charlie is trying to pet a cat, it scratches her then the toasts it, again people (and me this time, maybe it would have different if it was a dog) laughed at that too. This is what I mean at some things. Zac does this silly neck cracking thing when he's using his abilities too, I don't know if this is in the book and can't remember if it's in the old one, plain and simply it's silly though.
Now it's not all bad and silly, when people are using their powers the Carpenter tunes pump and it's almost like a different movie. Yes I suppose it's more like a superhero film, strangely enough this referenced later in the film, saying Charlie is like a superhero.
There's a LOT of differences in this film compared to the original too, such as Charlie isn't abducted her dad is, the farm ends up a massacre scene also there's another psychic hunting them from the shop rather agents.
So the premise under the guise of a clinical trial people deemed to have telekinesis, psychic or other powers are drawn in to use a special drug called LOT6. Two of them are a young couple who end up being Charlie's parents later, also some of the only survivors of the trial.
Cut to years later they have a baby who grows up into 11yr old Charlie. She has the power of pyrokineis, telepathy and slight precog too. Yeah she's like super powerful. They've been on the run, don't use much technology like internet, smart phones etc. This is because they're hiding from Charlie that they are on the run.
She's in school trying to have a normal education etc, but there's bullies, of course its always bullies. One day they fet the better of her coping mechanism and charlie explodes a bathroom stall. This puts the Shop on their trail. The parents constantly bicker about helping charlie either use her powers or have the dad use his ability to make her forget about them. Though they flip flop about this until the mum is killed by the shops assassin psychic.
Her dad can't use his power to often as it's draining/hurting him now, thanks to Charlie they escape.
Charlie and dad go on the run when they meet an old guy who takes him back to his farm. Charlie finds his bed ridden wife who years before was in an accident. When the news shows them as fugitives she prices they're innocent by proving her powers telling him his wife forgives him. He tries to tell the arriving police he made a mistake then the psychic assassin guy turns the cops heads into Swiss cheese with a sniper rifle.
Charlie escapes and daddy Zac is taken back to the shop.
I was impressed by her going to free her dad like he freed her in the original, except this is the end of this movie.
I won't give away much more except it's a great scene with the tunes blasting too. BUT one major retraction to me was that the dad uses his powers one last time to MAKE Charlie destroy the facility, I didn't like that after his reluctance to do it before has he just turned his little girl into a killer?
I get it why he used his power so it would allow her to do what she did right after it with a clean conscious. As you can tell I'm trying to spoil to much as I never do unless a film is super dire.
So that leads onto my ranking and I've been thinking really hard on this. I really liked a lot if aspects of this movie but also really hated others. So after deliberation THN is awarding Firestarter 2022 a 2 out of 5 stars but say it's worth a watch if there's nothing else, maybe I should read the book?
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