Worst of all, the film ends with the suggestion of a possible sequel, which retroactively detracts from what came before. The climactic conflict arrives abruptly, before the characters and stakes are strongly established. The 2022 version is too short and it often looks too cheap. The main problem is that “Firestarter” is meant to be an episodic saga, moving through all the places where Andy and Charlie think they might be safe, before the hunters on their trail drive them to their ultimate destination: the facility that creates super-psychic freaks. Thomas and Teems’ “Firestarter” sets out in a similarly thematically rich direction - starting as the study of an angry dad, cursed by his youthful mistakes and unwilling to shoulder his responsibilities for their consequences. And the production has scored a coup in enlisting the legendary horror director and soundtrack composer John Carpenter to provide one of his hauntingly minimalist scores, co-written with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.īut at the same time, Carpenter’s contributions here are a reminder of how expertly he handled his own King adaptation: 1983’s “Christine,” which retained all the adolescent angst and interpersonal tension that make King’s “haunted car” story really go. Whenever Charlie loses her cool (so to speak), her skin-melting fury is as gory and nightmarish as it should be.

Thomas, who previously made the effectively spooky low-budget ghost story “The Vigil,” handles the horror parts of “Firestarter” reasonably well. Institutional arrogance ruined Charlie’s mother and father and it turned Charlie into a human weapon, with minimal control over her powers and no honest prospect of a normal childhood. But hope is in short supply for the McGees. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays their preadolescent daughter Charlie, whose own pyrokinetic abilities - which allow her to start fires with her mind when she’s really angry - have drawn the attention of the same agency that experimented on her folks.įor most of the movie, Andy and Charlie are on the run, trying to elude the program’s big boss Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben) and her psychic operative John Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes). Zac Efron plays Andy McGee, who along with his wife Vicky ( Sydney Lemmon) developed psychic powers as the result of the secret government drug trial they participated in as college kids. Though the story’s been updated to the present day, the premise is the same.

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