Firestarter (Thomas, 2022)
Here are five nice things I can say about the people involved in the production of Firestarter:
- Writer Scott Teems did a great documentary about Hal Holbrook playing Mark Twain several years ago. His screenplay for the Holbrook vehicle That Evening Sun was really well done. The dude has talent.
- Zac Efron is one of our most underrated actors. Seriously, check out Me and Orson Welles sometime if you don’t believe. Made a year before High School Musical 3, it is about a high school student who ends up in an Orson Welles production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. His decency carries The Greatest Showman through some plot holes, and his participation shows tremendous range. He is a great talent.
- Ryan Kiera Armstrong did sixteen episodes of Anne With an E, a Netflix show so good, I am tempted to go rewatch it now to wash the bad taste of Firestarter out of my mouth. Talk about works that showcase the fragile and frightening emotional swings of young girls! She’s got a future.
- A music credit goes to one John Howard Carpenter, whose films, including Halloween, were credited by Tom Tykwer as a formative influence.
- A guy by the name of Anthony Veilleux is credited with tattoo design. He has a couple dozen make-up and prosthetic credits, including doing tattoo design on the Carrie remake with Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore. (I’m sure you will agree with me that the tattoo design is one of the best things about the Carrie remake.)
None of this has anything to do with Firestarter itself, a movie so bad I wouldn’t bother to review it had Universal not made my doing so a precondition to sending me a screening link. It would be easy enough to mock them for the boneheadedness of that decision, but given that the link came a good seven hours after when I could have used one of my three weekly tickets from AMC A-List to see it for free, I should probably remember an adage about those of us who live in glass houses.
It is a bad movie is what I am saying.
But remember, bad movies are made by people who have done a lot of other things, many of which have enriched our lives. So I’ll cut them some slack. Gloria Reuben, for instance, had a run of several great years on the television drama ER. I like a lot of the people involved in this movie and I wish them success as they move on from this piece of junk to projects where their talents might be better utilized.
