Firestarter flames out.

There’s a curious contradiction at the heart of 1984’s Firestarter: it’s a film about uncontrollable power that feels completely restrained. Drew Barrymore illuminates the screen as Charlie, the girl with pyrokinetic abilities, but the movie around her is, frankly, a bit of a mess. It has the bones of a thriller and the nervous system of a horror movie, but lacks the musculature to make anything of them. The execution lands somewhere between a TV movie and a Tangerine Dream music video.

King’s novel is one of his more straightforward ones; a chase story embellished with government overreach, parental trauma, and the weaponisation of innocence and the film adaptation doesn’t take many liberties with the basic structure. Andy McGee (David Keith) and his daughter Charlie (Barrymore) are on the run from a shady agency known as The Shop, who want to exploit Charlie’s pyrokinetic powers for military gain, but the film mistakes fidelity to plot for faithfulness to purpose, dragging King’s narrative beats onto the screen with all the energy of a half-stubbed cigarette.

Director Mark L Lester approaches the material with the same blunt efficiency he would bring to Commando, but what worked for Schwarzenegger’s camouflaged revenge fantasy doesn’t quite translate to paranoia-laced psychic horror. Almost every performance, save perhaps for Martin Sheen’s enjoyably slippery Shop director, feels miscalibrated, with George C Scott’s casting as the assassin Rainbird, here reimagined with an eye patch, an air of cultural appropriation, and the ethics and performance subtlety of a panto villain, particularly baffling. He’s so miscast it’s almost surreal, adding to the film’s existing sins of wasting the likes of Freddie Jones and Louise Fletcher.

Barrymore, coming off E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial, is magnetic in moments but the film can’t decide whether to treat her as a victim, a troubled hero or a weapon of mass destruction and her performance wobbles as it tries to gravitate to where the film needs her to be in any given moment. The film’s soundtrack is arguably its most distinctive asset, with Tangerine Dream’s pulsing synth score offering a chill the direction can’t quite match. The fire effects, when they arrive, range from adequate to impressive, but the climactic pyrotechnics aren’t filmed artfully to disguise the obviousness of the gas rigs, flame bars and propane mortars that are being used. The fires look like special effects rather than the synthesis of pyrokinetic fury.

There’s also a lingering sense that Firestarter wants you to have read Firestarter. It sketches motivations and characters without really investing in them; the emotional toll of Andy’s powers (which cause nosebleeds and migraines when he “pushes” people) is noted but never properly explored and his death lands with a shrug, rather than a gut-punch. The Shop’s scientific horror is likewise vaguely articulated but never develops any traction, often thanks to location choices. Secret organisations tend not to inspire too much dread when their headquarters are chintzy mansions and as an adaptation, it leaves out the novel’s anxiety but none of its narrative beats, resulting in a film that feels both overlong and undercooked.

With a sharper script, more focussed direction and a more coherent tone, Firestarter could have played in the same league as Scanners or Carrie but despite ample thespian kindling and narrative oxygen, it never quite catches and instead smoulders until eventually guttering out.