Blumhouse’s Firestarter remake is dining on ashes.
The charred remains of Firestarter might not be an obvious place to try and rekindle cinematic heat but there’s no studio more determined to rake over the ashes than Blumhouse in search of some new property to set the box office alight. Nearly forty years after the first adaptation, 2022’s take on King’s pyrokinetic paranoid road trip version arrives with more polished production values and a credible cast only to immediately snuff things out by making all the same mistakes as the first film, falling short of reimagining and settling instead for retread.
Zac Efron takes on Andy McGee, carrying a convincing world-weariness that suits a man whose powers drain him just as surely as the years spent on the run. Opposite him, Ryan Kiera Armstrong ages Charlie up a little from Barrymore’s Molotov moppet but with those extra years comes a little more edge to Charlie’s destructive potential, but where Barrymore more than held her own against every member of the original cast, this version never quite trusts Armstrong to inhabit the character as a lead rather than a MacGuffin. There’s a chemistry between the pair, for sure, but it never feels like it’s the emotional heart of the story it should be. What King wrote as familial intimacy under siege here becomes more a sketch that’s only half coloured in.
The Shop itself gets a sinister glow-up but remains frustratingly opaque nevertheless, reduced to shadowy corridors and vague menace. Michael Greyeyes at least rescues Rainbird from George C Scott’s over the top moustache-twirling, but even his presence can’t give weight to a story that declines to fully define its antagonists. Where the novel examined the use and abuse of power, institutional and parental, this adaptation barely scratches the thematic service in favour of essaying a glossy X-Files episode with extra fireballs.
On a technical level, at least, 2022’s Firestarter clears the low bar set by its predecessor; the cinematography is competent, sometimes stylish and the pyrotechnics more expansive and destructive. Again, a synth-heavy score does some of the heavy lifting, courtesy of John Carpenter – yes, that John Carpenter – and his son Cody Carpenter in collaboration with Daniel Davies, injecting a pulse the film itself struggles to sustain. The production flourishes elevate the packaging but can’t really disguise the hollowness of what’s inside, a genuine cinematic Easter egg. It looks better than 1984, it sounds better than 1984, but it doesn’t feel much better than its predecessor.
Even the deviations, most notably in the final act, sit uncomfortably because they feel like they’re done for shock value or some kind of last-gasp grasp for differentiation. It’s a shame the film couldn’t lean more into its updating because in an age of modern anxieties from social media to school shootings there is ample fuel for Firestarter to become a bonfire of the inanities of the present day but the film’s too anxious itself to get to its next conflagration lest the audience’s attention wavers.
Blumhouse’s Firestarter is, ultimately, an echo of an echo. The original looked cheap, sure, and this one looks slick, but only one is memorable and it’s not this one. Perhaps Firestarter is just one of those novels where what can be put on screen is just never going to capture the heat of what’s on the page.
