Firestarter

Firestarter (2022) movie review

So Firestarter is based on the novel by Stephen King, which also had an adaptation n 1984, which I honestly haven’t seen. The film follows a young girl who can set things on fire using just her mind. When dangerous people come for her, she and her father have to go on the run.

Now with exception to the great adaptations of Stephen King properties, I feel like there’s a strange trend in the one-two punch that is: an 80s version that isn’t very good and a new remake that somehow isn’t any better. What I’m trying to say is: Firestarter might be the worst movie of the year so far. Go see it if you fancy being bored for a solid 94 minutes.

Look I’ll get this over quickly because- gosh I just don’t want to talk about this movie. The runtime is somehow the best and worst thing about the film. Typically I would say that this film should be longer. It is very underdeveloped, making it impossible to care about a single character in this brisk film. (I mean it’s even 30 minutes shorter than the original!) That said, I would only want this movie longer if it were competently made. As it stands, the BEST thing about this movie is that its so short.

When I say competently made, I mean this is a consistently badly acted, badly shot, poorly paced, lazily edited, colorless mess completely void of any personality or interesting events and complete with probably one of the worst scores of 1984 in a film that feels like its one of the worst Blumhouse horror films of the mid 2000s. Allow me to briefly elaborate…

Everyone in this movie is bafflingly bad. We know Zac Efron is a solid actor and he’s had some great performances- but gosh he doesn’t want to be here. And yeah everyone else is pretty terrible too. John Carpenter, who as a composer is the master of “Oh I can play 6 notes on the piano,” tries his hardest to delicate lull the audience to sleep while the only thing keeping us away through the colorless visuals and atrocious dialogue is the laughably consistent asymmetrical framing, which plagues this film like a bad rash.

Oh the director of like- absolutely nothing? Makes sense. Who wrote this? The guy who wrote Halloween Kills? Wonderful. Look, I can’t think of a single nice thing to say about this movie. Firestarter is somewhere between dull and boring and absolutely atrocious. I don’t know if I’ll remember this film at the end of the year or not, but right now, this is the least I’ve enjoyed anything released in theaters 2022. 2/10.

So Firestarter? Did you see it? I mean this movie is pretty much fodder for Doctor Strange anyway… But hey, what did you think? And how does it compare to the 1984 version? Be sure to leave a like and a comment below and let us know! Thanks for reading!

-review by Ryan Prince