As far as vintage Stephen King adaptations go, Mark Lester’s FIRESTARTER isn’t exactly a sacred text. While it’s a mostly functional translation of the novel to the screen, it’s a middling entry in the King canon, dwarfed by its more effective 80s contemporaries like CHRISTINE, THE DEAD ZONE, and THE SHINING, to name a few. Where any revisits to those titles might invite skepticism (and I’ll be the first to admit that I was nervous about DOCTOR SLEEP), FIRESTARTER seems like exactly the sort of thing that could use another pass, especially when it’s spearheaded by the talent involved here. Blumhouse Productions needs no introduction, while director Keith Thomas is responsible for THE VIGIL, one of the better slow-burn horrors in recent memory. He’s paired here with screenwriter Scott Teems, a Blumhouse staple who co-wrote HALLOWEEN KILLS and is currently attached to the studio’s revival of THE EXORCIST. A historical wrong has been righted by bringing John Carpenter aboard to score, allowing him to finally put his stamp on the story Universal forced him to abandon decades ago. Blumhouse has assembled a fantastic cast to boot, positioning FIRESTARTER to be the latest spark in the King resurgence.
However, it’s like they say in sports: the game can’t be played on paper. And no matter how impressive FIRESTARTER may look in theory, the reality is like water dousing a roaring flame, with any excitement and expectations quickly snuffed out, reduced to cold, smoky piles of ash.
To its credit, FIRESTARTER doesn’t allow the illusion of greatness to linger for too long. Clocking in 20 minutes shorter than its 1984 predecessor, its primary concern seems to be breezing right through your life with as little fuss as possible. Instead of unfolding in-medias-res like King’s novel and the first adaptation, it mostly plays out linearly, with the opening credits taking care of Andy McGee’s (Zac Efron) backstory. As a college student, he and his future wife Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) participate in an experiment where a hallucinogenic substance grants them extrasensory powers. When they have a child (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), she, too, has such extraordinary powers that The Shop, a shadowy government agency, has resources dedicated to tracking her down. After 11 years of peace, though, young Charlie’s previously repressed powers manifest in an explosive incident at school, putting the McGees on the Shop’s radar and forcing them to go on the run before the agency’s men can capture them.
Nothing about the general thrust of FIRESTARTER is likely to surprise anyone familiar with the source material, an approach that isn’t inherently misguided since we’re talking about an adaptation, after all. It’s just that this is the most half-hearted rendition imaginable, as the film languidly hits plot points with the same enthusiasm you might have when checking off your grocery list. The script condenses entire beats but carefully retains familiar moments (Andy manipulating someone into giving him and Charlie a ride by making them imagine a $100 bill, the duo taking refuge at Irv Manders’ farmhouse), sort of like a cover band that knows they have to play the greatest hits. The first two-thirds of FIRESTARTER resemble someone reading a Cliff’s Notes version of a book aloud, only you already know the story yourself. It’s a completely perfunctory experience where all parties involved are checking their watches to make sure none of this takes up too much of their time.
What’s more, just about every choice seems to be made with the explicit purpose of undermining whatever intrigue this retelling might have. Are you curious to see Zac Efron transition into on-screen dadhood, no matter how existentially terrifying that might be? Too bad because his relationship with Charlie is completely undercooked, as the script affords them precious little time to forge a believable bond as they evade The Shop. The big conflict here is Andy’s reluctance for Charlie to even harness her power; unlike his wife, he wants his daughter to suppress her powers until he finally relents, a wrinkle that isn’t entirely unwelcome. But like the other embellishments scattered throughout FIRESTARTER, it’s just superficial drama, the sort of thing that, again, looks proper on paper. There’s a clear arc here that finds Charlie coming to accept and embrace her abilities—it’s just that it’s in the service of a movie that’s looking to do the bare minimum in all respects and does a disservice to both Efron and Armstrong, tasked here with shouldering a film that’s barely invested in their characters.
You might notice some other interesting casting choices, like Kurtwood Smith as Joseph Wanless, the doctor in charge of the experimental Lot-6 serum. In addition to hearing his voice during the opening credits, he appears for all of one scene before the character is unceremoniously dropped from the proceedings, making you wonder why they even bothered to cast him in the first place. John Beasley is an inspired choice as Irv, whose backstory has an additional layer of tragedy that you might expect to make him feel like an even more righteous protector when the authorities arrive at his door—only he’s the one who calls the cops in the first place, making him more pitifully misguided than he is fiercely virtuous. And, again, it’s not in the service of anything particularly interesting: like most of the film’s supporting characters, Irv Manders saunters right through the revolving door after a brief appearance.
Maybe you’re excited about the casting of Michael Greyeyes as John Rainbird, a notably welcome choice for obvious reasons. And while it’s nice that an indigenous performer is inhabiting this role instead of George C. Scott, Greyeyes simply isn’t given enough to do. His severe, stoic turn transforms Rainbird into more of an enigmatic Terminator who exists simply to hunt down targets—well, until the script suddenly decides that he has something of a conscience. Either way, you miss the maniacal glimmer that lurked in Scott’s eyes: his Rainbird was an unrepentant psychopath with odd but clearly-defined motivations. This Rainbird mostly exists as a plot curveball that sends FIRESTARTER down an unexpected path during its climax, and an added dimension to his character is completely unearned, mostly because he doesn’t even share a scene alone with Charlie until the end.
I’m dancing around spoilers here, but anyone remotely familiar with FIRESTARTER will recognize that a large chunk of the story must be altered for that to be true. Right around the hour mark, it starts to feel like somebody lost the Cliff’s Notes and starts to make it up as they go along. In what could have been one of the film’s most interesting choices, Rainbird’s motivations shift, bringing a different (albeit underdeveloped) dimension to Charlie’s climactic, fiery rampage through The Shop. But instead of engaging with its plot deviations in any meaningful way, FIRESTARTER once again trudges through the motions, serving up exactly what everyone craves from this story when Charlie burns The Shop to the ground, letting the audience to delight in a bunch of bad guys being set on fire.
Once again you might assume that, surely, this at least is worthwhile, given the various advancements in special effects since 1984. Somehow, though, even this doesn’t pan out, mostly because the mayhem is so small scale. For such a menacing government operation, The Shop is ludicrously understaffed, sporting maybe a dozen grunts for Charlie to scorch before she simply blows the entire place to hell. Gone is the original film’s wicked gleefulness at staging wanton destruction: where that film featured fireballs laying waste to a horde of extras in an expansive, external set, this one mostly finds Charlie melting down a handful of soldiers in a nondescript corridor. Just about the only moment that works here leans into the small scale of it all, as Charlie slowly burns a man to death inside of a car, giving the effects team a rare opportunity to indulge in some gnarly gore gags. Otherwise, the climax here is emblematic of just how utterly small and underwhelming FIRESTARTER is. While the original film was plagued by a slashed production budget, it still managed a glimmer of grandiosity by really going for it during its climax. This one, on the other hand, can’t even be said to go out with a whimper because that would imply it has any kind of pulse in the first place.
Lester’s film also compensated for its diminished budget the same way most scrappy productions do: with style, compelling performances, and by squeezing every single dollar onto the screen. You get the sense that the original FIRESTARTER leaves nothing in the tank: it’s driven by a sort of sweaty, manic energy before it settles in to focus on its characters ahead of that big, blazing climax. The same can’t be said for this update, a directionless bore that everyone sleepwalks through, leaving you wondering just what inspired this take: nothing about it can be said to improve upon the original in any meaningful way, mostly because its various production houses seem to have clipped its wings at the budgetary level. If online sources are to be believed, Blumhouse and its associates (it’s only fair that Weed Road Pictures, BoulderLight Pictures, and Angry Adam Productions also stand accused) invested $12 million, the same amount that caused Carpenter to walk away from the project nearly 40 years ago when Universal cut his budget. Even if Blumhouse’s track record with “micro-budget” genre films makes them uniquely qualified for this, FIRESTARTER just feels plain cheap in a way the studio’s productions rarely do: Karim Hussain’s pallid, underlit, and unsightly cinematography only further diminishes the unimpressive production design, while most of the pyro effects consist of unconvincing digital flames.
Transcending a meager budget becomes an even more uphill battle when an entire endeavor is so thoroughly uninspired as this. FIRESTARTER ultimately reminds me of the lesser films of Platinum Dunes, whose productions sometimes felt like obligations rather than genuine efforts to revitalize a moribund title. And, sure, it yields a nice score from Carpenter and his cohorts (his son, Cody, and Daniel Davies), but even it can only do so much to elevate material that plants its feet in the mud and refuses to budge. They could have just as easily released this score as the fourth LOST THEMES album, and it would have been just as worthwhile, maybe even more so because it would take up less time than the 94 minutes FIRESTARTER asks of you. Calling this adaptation “disappointing” is an understatement: filmmaking is such an alchemic process that misfires are bound to happen. However, this one lands with such an unassuming thud that you feel compelled to do a cinematic autopsy to determine just how a production with so much potential went completely haywire. Maybe it’s because we live in an age where studios are taking the “content” label to heart and are churning out junk they only expect us to barely pay attention to while we fold laundry. Despite the talent and material involved, FIRESTARTER feels like the result of an algorithm instead of a genuine, creative impulse, existing only to fill a content void that’s growing to be as insidious as anything Stephen King has ever conjured.
Tags: Adaptations, Blumhouse Productions, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies, Fire, Gloria Reuben, Horror, John Beasley, john carpenter, Karim Hussain, Keith Thomas, Kurtwood Smith, Mark Lester, Michael Greyeyes, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Scott Teems, Stephen King, Sydney Lemmon, Tim Alverson, Universal Pictures, Zac Efron
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