It's weird to me how much Stephen King is associated with horror. At least of his film adaptations he has a range of stories in many genres. Some if his most famous adaptations - Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile - aren't horror at all. And, most of his horror isn't even straight horror. Most I'd call SciFi with horror elements. The Shining was absolutely made into horror, but Doctor Sleep, which hems closer to the books focuses more on the supernatural than the horror. Misery is really a thriller. What I think happens is that King comes up with great horror idea - what if a car killed people, what if you were trapped and handcuffed under your husband who died while you were having sex - as a jumping point for a larger story. I leave a lot films adapted from his work less scared than thinking "that was a wild ride".
Firestarter is a great example of this. Due to the Blumhouse and Stephen King of it all, this is going to be known as a horror movie. It's really not though. It's the story of a girl who inherits powers from her parents who both took part in an experiment in college that gave powers to them. The girl is even more powerful than her parents, so they've gone into hiding for years to avoid getting locked away as science experiments. There's room for this to be scary. The little girl, played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong in this, can burn people alive. That's a creepy threat. And she kind of likes doing it. Even scarier. But the movie plays much more like she's Rogue in X-Men. It's filmed like a dark superhero movie, not like a horror movie. That in and of itself isn't a reason to dislike the movie. Rather, it's an irritation I wanted to point out that I have with King adaptations.
That said, Firestarter is a bad movie. Uninterestingly bad too, so I don't want to spend too much time on it. The story of a family with powers on the run is very familiar. I don't care if the Firestarter book was an early example of it. The 2022 movie is tired. The film tries to find a middle ground between scares and exposition. I wish they would've picked one. A version where they play down the backstory about experiments and agencies and just make it a story about a child failing to control dangerous powers would've been good. Granted, that's just Brightburn, but I already said this story was familiar. Leaning even more into the X-Men of it all would've been fun too. This middle ground where Kurtwood Smith occasionally exposition dumps and the girl might burn a cat didn't do much for me. It all felt like part 1 of a story that I didn't want to see part 2 of.
I hate calling people out here, but the casting and performances were pretty dreadful. Zac Efron plays the girl's father. I'm generally a Zac Efron fan, because I like how hard he tries. That's a backhanded compliment, but I do appreciate that he tries things like comedy or roles that he's not comfortable in. At some point that will pay off with him either finding a niche that suits him or by putting in enough reps to be functional in a variety of roles. He's all wrong for this though. It's impossible to read Efron as an everyman or down on his luck. He’s a father in hiding, struggling to make ends meet who also looks like he hasn't eaten a carb or missed a day at the gym in years. At the very least, he should avoid the shirtless scenes to show off the abs if he wants to seem like an everyman. The effect of him using his powers is that he starts to bleed from his eyes. That's something that sounds creepier than it is. In the film, it looks kind of silly. Ryan Kiera Armstrong isn't a child actor I'm eager to see in other things. I don't like dunking on kids, so I'll leave it at that. Gloria Reuben plays the leader of the group going after Efron and Armstrong. I've liked her in other roles in the past, but my god is she bad in this. I honestly began to question if she was in the same room as her scene partners at times. I wouldn't be surprised if all lot of the bad acting is due to the direction or even the editing. I don't know the reason, but no one in this cast came out looking good.
The one good thing I can say about the movie is that the score and soundtrack is pretty good. I don't have great music vocabulary, but it was all very cool and ominous. There weren't any obvious needle drops. It really felt like the music department was determined to make sure no one could blame them for how much of a sticker the film is.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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