Firestarter has a spark but fails to ignite

Universal Pictures

John Waters once said about movie remakes something to the effect of ‘stop remaking good movies, remake the bad ones and make them better.’ Good advice, but not something the makers of the new Firestarter remake heeded. They tried, I’m sure, but the efforts were probably hampered by a tiny budget. Blumhouse is nothing if not efficient, and can usually turn out an impressive product on a very low budget. But the low budget also requires drastic changes to the original Stephen King story and this is where the problems begin.

Firestarter focuses on the McGee family. As seen in a montage during the film’s opening credits college students Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) were volunteers in some sort of government experiment for something called ‘Lot 6’. The substance gave the participants special powers, but it all went horribly wrong. Andy and Vicky married (it’s not clear if they were married during the experiment), and eventually had a baby daughter named Charlene, who went by the name ‘Charlie’. The side effect of the parents’ powers was that they were carried over to the baby who had the ability to start fires. Knowing about the child, The Shop — the agency conducting the experiments — have been trying to track down the McGees so they can take Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and study her (apparently no one expected two of the volunteers to hook up and actually produce a child which would then have a completely new power). The McGees have done their best to stay off the grid — no internet, no cell phones — but send Charlie to public school to give her a sense of normalcy. It doesn’t work because other kids see her as weird, and Charlie is losing control over her power, which exposes the family to The Shop.

New Shop head Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben) — male in the original story, female here — contacts a ‘retired’ Shop asset named Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) to bring Charlie in — alive — but even with his own abilities he is unable to stop Charlie and Andy from escaping (unfortunately Vicky is not so lucky). It becomes a game of cat and mice as Andy and Charlie try to make their way to Boston, with Andy using his power of mind control on an unsuspecting ‘Good Samaritan’ to give them a ride. But it’s not long before the man realizes he is harboring fugitives and The Shop and Rainbird are alerted to their whereabouts. With Andy’s powers beginning to take a toll on his brain — he literally bleeds from his eyes every time he uses it — he’s easily captured but as Charlie escapes her chances of survival on her own and her psychic connection to her dad put her in a bad position. Does she keep running, or does she try to save her father?

Universal Pictures

Firestarter, due to its low budget, feels like a made-for-TV movie (and the fact that Universal is dumping it on Peacock at the same time as the theatrical release says a lot about their confidence in the film’s success). It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen the 1984 original, but I don’t remember it being very good either (seeing a clip now, it also feels like it was a TV movie), and star Drew Barrymore — coming off the success of E.T. — was a bit over-the-top (obviously Spielberg had a way with directing kids that Mark Lester did not). In the remake, the major improvement is in the casting of Zac Efron as Andy and Ryan Kiera Armstrong as Charlie. It’s been a minute since Efron stepped before the cameras in a dramatic role, and his presence here is very welcome. It’s weird to think of him playing a dad, but his connection with Armstrong feels authentic, his bond with her feels real and you believe he’d go to any lengths to protect her. It’s a really nice performance. Armstrong is also very good, and if you saw her on the most recent season of American Horror Story, you know she can play a sinister child with ease. Some of her more emotional scenes didn’t ring with authenticity (the unnecessary scene with the cat being the main one), but when she is charged with unleashing her powers, she really pulls off the intensity the part requires. I also have to give credit to the filmmakers for righting an egregious wrong from the original with the casting of Michael Greyeyes as Rainbird, who is Cherokee in the source novel and was played by George C. Scott in the 1984 film. While the character is now authentic, Greyeyes is just saddled with a one-note Terminator-like character (he has much more to do in the novel). Kurtwood Smith is fine in a glorified cameo, but Gloria Reuben is shockingly bad as Hollister. It seems at times like she had just been given her lines and received no guidance from the director. Some other members of the cast have a long list of credits but most were not familiar faces, and they just were not well-served director Keith Thomas, who only has one other feature film to his credit, plus a short and a music video. Some actors have a natural instinct for their roles and others need a guiding hand, and Thomas just seemed to let his actors do their own thing, to their detriment.

The film’s fire effects are serviceable and there are a couple of pretty gruesome burn victim make-up effects. Efron’s bleeding from the eyes is also handled pretty well considering it was all probably CGI. The cinematography, production and lighting design and film editing are all fine, while some of Thomas’ camera set-ups leave a lot of the action to take place off-screen (again, perhaps due to the budget). I kind of got the feeling that this movie was made for the sole purpose of Universal keeping the copyright. Studios sometimes rush films into production if their rights to the material is about to lapse so that somewhere down the road they can actually do a better version. Firestarter just feels like it was made on the cheap for that purpose (and this is only my own assumption) because the source material could be done well on a grander scale with a huge Hollywood studio budget. Ironically, the most successful aspect of the film is the musical score by John Carpenter and his collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel A. Davies. Back in 1984, Carpenter was to be the director of the original film but Universal got cold feet after the box office failure of Carpenter’s The Thing (and probably the lukewarm reaction to Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine in 1983) and gave the film to Mark Lester. Even though this version of the film is set in the present, the synth-heavy score gives it a nice 1980s feel, almost making one wish the film had actually retained the story’s 1980 time period.

Firestarter has a bit of a spark to it thanks to the performances of Efron and Armstrong and the musical score. It just really needed someone with a bit more experience behind the camera to bring the performances and story together, as well as a bigger budget to give the film the scope it needed. The remake runs 20 minutes shorter than the 1984 version (which some reviews call ‘bloated’), and it feels like there are major story point missing, particularly with the Rainbird character. But the short running time and the good parts mean the film is at least watchable — on TV. It’s not a film I’d recommend running to see in a theater (at full price, anyway). I didn’t hate it, but even with the decent performances by the leads, it was still ultimately a disappointment.

Firestarter has a run time of 1 hour 34 minutes, is rated R for violent content.