The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
I never thought that I could be this irritated by the remake of such a mediocre movie, but here we are. Firestarter is based on the 1980 novel by Stephen King, which is one of the few 80s King novels that I haven’t read. I have seen the original film adaptation from 1984, though, and largely considered it to be in the middle-of-the-road, forgettable part of the King adaptation spectrum. I now need to rethink that ranking system because the 2022 Firestarter makes the original seem like frigging masterpiece. Hell, it makes the little-known 2002 sequel Firestarter 2: Rekindled seem like a masterpiece (though, to be fair, Firestarter 2 is a better New Mutants movie than The New Mutants).
Warning: There will be spoilers in this review because I don’t know how to explain how half-assed this version is without spoilers. Considering that I was the only person in the theater for this, I’m guessing you won’t care.
Firestarter is the story of a man named Andy and his daughter Charlie as they are chased by government agents. When he was in college, Andy (along with his future wife, Vicky) volunteered as a guinea pig for a government experiment for a new chemical. The experiment causes them to gain superpowers (Andy becomes telepathic, Vicky becomes telekinetic) and their eventual child Charlie to have pyrokinesis. The government has been monitoring Charlie and is convinced that she could become a powerful, maybe even nuclear weapon, and hires a hitman/mercy named John Rainbird to hunt them down and bring her back to the secret government agency known as The Shop.
Broadly speaking, Firestarter is a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. The original is primarily a drama with elements of science fiction and a bit of horror. The heart of the story is the relationship between the father and daughter, but it doesn’t skimp on either frightening humans or the brutality of Charlie’s powers. The new version lacks much of the drama due to bizarre changes to the story, has barely a whiff of horror or menace and has a shocking lack of pyro effects for a movie called fucking Firestarter. I’m completely at a loss as to what this was going for.
Right off the bat, this version makes some baffling choices that ruin any momentum in the story. The 1984 version begins with Andy and Charlie on the run, only revealing the backstory in brief flashbacks. This version tells the story linearly, forcing us to sit through an entire third of the film before we arrive at the starting point of the original. That could be a viable change if the backstory was compelling, but it isn’t. We see Charlie getting bullied, losing her temper and finding out that her powers can be dangerous when she is pushed around. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s fucking Carrie. A shitty version of Carrie, because why fuck up one King story when you can fuck up two? Charlie even has full-blown telepathy and telekinesis in this version, likely because that is cheaper to film than setting stuff on fire. More on that in a moment.
One of the most maligned elements of the original version was the casting of George C. Scott as the Native American psychopath John Rainbird. I think it goes without saying that George C. Scott is white and, therefore, was miscast in terms of the race of the character. However, as miscast as he may have been, Scott was terrifying in that role. He is a frightening man with not-so-subtle undertones of pedophilia and casually offers to murder a child by punching her nose into her brain. He is a well-spoken, truly scary character. In this version, well, he’s Native American. They got that right, I guess. The character is now played by Michael Greyeyes, who is racially accurate, but not nearly as intimidating. He’s less intimidating because he is trying so damn hard to be intimidating, as he walks through the film as a one-note terminator as opposed to the more nuanced, sophisticated maniac played by Scott.
The reduction of Rainbird’s impact is increased by more baffling changes that eliminated his most frightening subplot. In the original, Andy and Charlie are both captured by The Shop. Rainbird pretends to be a janitor in the government compound to gradually become friends with Charlie and this is the most unnerving thing in the original movie because we, as the audience, know that this man is a monster and it is legitimately suspenseful to watch Charlie grow to trust him. These are the scariest scenes in the original movie and Scott is absolutely terrifying.
Well, all of that is gone. In this version, Charlie isn’t taken to the compound with her dad, which eliminates that entire subplot. That’s not the only thing that’s eliminated, though, as they also eliminate most scenes of the Firestarter starting fucking fires. The scene where The Shop finds her and her dad at the farm and she sets them all on fire and blows up their cars? Gone. All of it. Instead of making a stand, she just runs away. Most notably, the entire fucking ending is gone. The original movie ends in glorious, absolute carnage as Charlie throws fireballs and murders every motherfucker working at this agency, It is like the ending of Carrie, but with fire. It’s glorious. That is all gone. Instead, she walks down a hallway, sets a couple of small fires and uses her telepathic powers to force two guys to shoot each other. This is like the dollar store version of the original, lacking any of the intensity, horror or even basic logic of that version.
Speaking of illogical bullshit, fuck the ending of this movie. After Charlie kills a few random people at this government agency (they could have been secretaries just doing their job, no idea), she sees the error of her ways and decides to allow Rainbird to live. She fucking murders a whole bunch of people and then decides to allow Rainbird, her mother’s killer, to live. The movie then ends with Charlie and Rainbird holding hands and walking off together. FUCK YOU, MOVIE. I am glad that I was the only person in the theater for this, as I didn’t have to restrain the onslaught of profanity that flew from my mouth as this movie was ending.
I have two nice things to say that save this from being an F grade. First, Ryan Kiera Armstrong is good as Charlie and I legitimately feel bad for this girl here. She seems like a great young actress and she tries her best here, but she is just let down by the awful script. Second, the musical score is great. The original had a great score by Tangerine Dream and this one has an equally great synth score that’s co-composed by the great John Carpenter. This is significant because the 1984 Firestarter was going to be directed by Carpenter, but he was fired by Universal when The Thing bombed at the box office. Carpenter instead adapted King’s Christine and The Thing is now considered one of the greatest horror films ever made, so Universal can suck it.
This is awful. I have no idea why this exists, as Firestarter isn’t among King’s most popular books, but there is a perfectly mediocre version from the 80s that you can watch instead. In fact, at least watch that version first so that you can see the absolutely inexplicable choices that were made with this version. I will not remember that this movie exists a year from now, and that is the greatest mercy of this film.
