Firestarter (2022) Review

 "Liar, liar, pants on fire."

-Charlie McGee

The entire McGee family has been on the run for as long as Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) can remember and she is forced to hide her pyrokinetic powers.  When the McGee's are finally found out, Charlie and her father, Andy (Zac Efron), have leave their latest home and Charlie has to learn to use her explosive powers.

What Works:

The best part of the movie is far and away the score.  John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies did the music for this film and these guys can create a score.  The music kicks a ton of ass and I wish I would have just listened to the soundtrack instead of going to this movie.

Zac Efron does a very good job in a role that is very against type for him.  Seeing him in a paternal role is weird, but works well.  His character definitely has the best and most satisfying arc of the movie and Efron nails his final scene.

Finally, there is some solid gore on the rare occasion the movie decides to use it.  Very early on, we have some eyeball related trauma, which always gets to me, and later we have some nice looking practical burns.  The movie could have used more of this, but I'll take what we can get.

What Sucks:

Horror movies need rules to function.  We need to establish what the unusual characters, whether they be heroes or villains, can do.  We need to know their strengths and weakness and what is really at stake for us to become invested in the story.  We don't get nearly enough of that.  The villains are extremly vague and the heroes are even vaguer.  We don't know much about the experiences of Andy and Vicki (Sydney Lemmon).  We needed to know more about what they went through and what they can do.  Same goes for Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes).  We weren't given enough information about any of them.  There is almost no exposition in this movie, but sometimes it is necessary to have it.

The 2nd act of this movie is one of the least interesting 2nd acts I have ever seen.  It's also incredibly short.  The first act sets up our characters before they go on the run.  I thought a significant chunk of the movie would be about them on the run.  That isn't the case.  We don't do much of anything in the 2nd act before we get to the climax.  They had a ton of potential to work with and did nothing with it.

The cinematography and the look of Firestarter is simply ugly.  A lot is out of focus and distractingly off center.  The way the movie is shot should not distract from the dialogue.  Plus all of the set design felt cheap.  There wasn't anything memorable about any of it.  It felt like an afterthought.

Finally, there is some pretty bad acting in this movie.  Our main antagonists, played by Michael Greyeyes and Gloria Reuban, are not good.  Maybe that's the directors fault, maybe it's the actors, but some of their line deliveries are just weird and took me out of the movie.

Verdict:

Firestarter had a lot of potential with awesome music, some fun gore, and a solid perfromance from Zac Efron, but some of the other performances are bad, the pacing is horrendous, the stakes are set up very poorly, and the film looks ugly.

 3/10: Very Bad