Post by Dracula on Jun 5, 2022 12:51:14 GMT -5
Firestarter(5/13/2022)
It certainly seemed like there were enough Stephen King books out there that the world would never run out of them, and yet we still find ourselves in this place where Hollywood is actually going back and taking second stabs at King’s work in the form of remakes like the recent re-dos of Carrie and Pet Semetary. That’s certainly the vain they were trying to tap with this second adaptation of his 1980 novel “Firestarter,” which was a good choice insomuch as the previous 1984 adaptation wasn’t very well remembered but also probably a bad choice in that the original novel was hardly King’s best in the first place. Another strike against it is that this “father of child with powers on the run from bad guys” concept, which wasn’t even entirely original when King took it up, has been ripped off endlessly in various forms in the years since and doesn’t feel very fresh at this point. So making this work again was going to take some pretty strong execution and that isn’t really what this movie provides. The film is hardly incompetent; its director Keith Thomas clearly knows the basics of filmmaking and I’m sure he’ll serve capably as a director for hire going forward but I don’t see any evidence here that he has any particular vision driving him. The film has some decent bits of fire-related gore and there are some interesting supporting actors here including John Beasley and Kurtwood Smith and Michael Greyeyes has a good presence as one of the villains. Zac Efron, however, is an odd choice to try to carry the film and while I don’t want to rag on an eleven year old actress let’s just say that the kid here is no Drew Barrymore. Ultimately this is a movie whose problem is less that it’s “bad” so much that it isn’t “good” or at least not good enough to be worth most people’s time. As someone who just casually watched it on Peacock, I can’t be too mad at it.
** out of Five
It certainly seemed like there were enough Stephen King books out there that the world would never run out of them, and yet we still find ourselves in this place where Hollywood is actually going back and taking second stabs at King’s work in the form of remakes like the recent re-dos of Carrie and Pet Semetary. That’s certainly the vain they were trying to tap with this second adaptation of his 1980 novel “Firestarter,” which was a good choice insomuch as the previous 1984 adaptation wasn’t very well remembered but also probably a bad choice in that the original novel was hardly King’s best in the first place. Another strike against it is that this “father of child with powers on the run from bad guys” concept, which wasn’t even entirely original when King took it up, has been ripped off endlessly in various forms in the years since and doesn’t feel very fresh at this point. So making this work again was going to take some pretty strong execution and that isn’t really what this movie provides. The film is hardly incompetent; its director Keith Thomas clearly knows the basics of filmmaking and I’m sure he’ll serve capably as a director for hire going forward but I don’t see any evidence here that he has any particular vision driving him. The film has some decent bits of fire-related gore and there are some interesting supporting actors here including John Beasley and Kurtwood Smith and Michael Greyeyes has a good presence as one of the villains. Zac Efron, however, is an odd choice to try to carry the film and while I don’t want to rag on an eleven year old actress let’s just say that the kid here is no Drew Barrymore. Ultimately this is a movie whose problem is less that it’s “bad” so much that it isn’t “good” or at least not good enough to be worth most people’s time. As someone who just casually watched it on Peacock, I can’t be too mad at it.
** out of Five
