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FIRESTARTER (2022)
Director: Keith Thomas Cast: Zac Efron, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Sydney Lemmon, Michael Greyeyes, Gloria Reuben, John Beasley, Kurtwood Smith MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:34 Release Date: 5/13/22 (wide; Peacock) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2022 The first act of Firestarter, screenwriter Scott Teems and director Keith Thomas' new adaptation of Stephen King's 1980 novel, takes its time, establishing the unique dynamic of a family with secret superpowers and hinting at the moral weight of using those abilities. In this way, these filmmakers seem intent on correcting the mistakes of the previous movie adaptation, which rushed into things, mostly ignored its characters beyond those powers and how they fit into the plot, and then spent a lot of time spinning its wheels. Once the plot in this version gets moving, though, Teems and Thomas throw away almost all of the character work and ideas they initially promise. If the first adaptation meandered its way into disappointment, this one sprints into a wall of it. The family here is made up of Andy McGee (Zac Efron), his wife Vicky (Sydney Lemmon), and the couple's 11-year-old daughter Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). A prologue, revolving around a nightmare, establishes both the girl's preternatural ability to light fires with the power of her mind and the father's fear that his daughter's flame-summoning will bring her nothing but pain. While the girl deals with a bully and unpredictable pre-adolescent emotions, Andy keeps the family afloat by working as a life coach. He has the ability to control minds, which comes in handy for people looking to quit smoking, but his power comes with a cost. Every time he uses it now, Andy starts bleeding from his eyes, so there's no telling what the consequences of Charlie's far more significant powers will be. There's some worthwhile material here, and Thomas treats it with surprising care. Efron's performance as a father who's tough on the outside but terrified for his little girl is believably sincere, and Armstrong, too, is strong in these early scenes, as a kid whose typical feelings of isolation are only heightened by the worry that, on account of the fire thing, her status as an outsider is deserved. Anyway, little of this matters, because the family has been hunted by the shadowy organization that gave Andy, Vicky, and, by extension of the couple's parentage, Charlie their superpowers. When word gets out that a little girl has caused a mysterious explosion in the bathroom of her school, Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben), the new head of that unexplained agency, sends telepath and expert assassin Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes, who's intimidating here and whose casting is one of the most obvious course corrections from the original movie) to capture Charlie. The rest of this becomes an extended chase, which has its characters running into or waiting around for the next plot point. In the aftermath of Rainbird's attack on the family, Andy tries to teach Charlie how to channel her powers, insisting that the girl put a cat she unintentionally immolated out of its misery (The two pray over a makeshift grave, only to belatedly remember that another death is probably more important). Then, he changes his mind on all of that, because her powers could easily mean the deaths of others and the toll of that is inescapable. A brief moment of such moral clarity, while the two hide on a farm owned by a helpful stranger (played by John Beasley), seems to be taking this story in a less predictable and more thoughtful direction. When Rainbird returns for the girl, that momentary hope quickly departs. All of this, as it turns out, is little more than exposition for an inevitable standoff between the super-powered family and the still-mysterious company/government agency/random science experiment team that wants Charlie for even more unclear reasons. The whole thing leads to a third act that is so simplistic, so hastily arrived at, and so contradictory to everything that has come before it (not to mention itself) that someone—Teems in the writing, Thomas in the assembly, or some producer or studio honcho in the post-production tinkering—has royally messed up things. Our conflicted protagonist becomes a cold, cruel executor of fiery death (among many other unthinking killings, setting a pleading, unarmed woman on fire, after offering a groan-worthy one-liner). After that, the movie's unmotivated and unearned attempts to bring it all back to reconciliation ring false, especially considering the focus of that act, and confounding, because all of these characters stopped developing or mattering once the chase is in motion. Firestarter moves from relative strength, to increasing weakness, and, finally, to failure, but at least the trip is a quick one. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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