L'oiseau de feu

Is this movie even an official sequel? I ask so because this movie totally ignores events from the previous movie and simply blatantly even alters things.

This movie is filled with some flashbacks, that however don't make any sense when you have already seen the first movie. It completely ignores some fact from the first movie as well as actual moments that we did see happening. Who knows, perhaps this is all more faithful to the actual Stephen King novel but just don't call your movie "Firestarter 2: Rekindled" when you are taking a totally different approach with the story and completely ignore the stuff from the earlier 1984 movie.

"Firestarter" had a pretty much closed ending. All of the bad guys died and Charlie McGee eventually ended up well. But guess what, apparently the bad guy didn't die at all. He just altered. He now suddenly looks like Malcolm McDowell with a half burned face, instead of George C. Scott, who played the villain John Rainbird in the first movie. But if you have seen the first movie you know that it's pretty much a solid fact that there is no way the character could still be alive, or at least could definitely not look as 'well' as Malcolm McDowell did. It reminded me of the way they brought back the Durant character in all of the Darkman sequels. Couldn't they simply come up with a fresh new villain?

But this is the foremost problem with this movie; it's a sequel without any imagination or good ideas. Here you have a movie in which your main character has the ability to put everything on fire with her telekinetic powers, as well as a bunch of other persons with X-Men like powers. Plenty of awesome ingredients and potential to play around with you would imaging but strangely enough the only thing they could come up with was letting the main character accidentally put stuff on fire every time she was getting too excited during sex. So great, she can never have an orgasm. An excellent subject for a science-fiction/thriller, you guys!

They really didn't come up with anything good or exciting, which is really the most disappointing thing about this movie and its story. But I still don't really know either what the main plot was supposed to be all about. Why does John Rainbird want to create super humans? And why does he need Charlie McGee for that so badly? What makes her so exceptional? Even though the movie is about 3 hours long (it can also be aired as a mini-series) nothing is really ever explained well enough, which also makes this movie a real unsatisfying one by the end, as well as just a pointless sequel and movie in general.

Also really don't understand why Dennis Hopper showed up in this. He plays a real boring character, that also really doesn't add anything to the story and could easily had been left out. It also would had been nice if they actually cast someone who somewhat looked like Drew Barrymore, who played the main lead in the movie but instead they casted brunette Marguerite Moreau. The acting in this movie was not all that bad though, which probably prevented it from ever becoming a truly bad and ridicules one.

No, I really don't want to sound like I completely hated it. It's definitely watchable all, in the long run. You probably have seen way worse than this movie but a better story should had really made this movie at least somewhat remotely exciting and original to watch.

You're really way better off watching just and only the first movie, which wasn't even that great of a movie in the first place either.

5/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Being a huge Stephen King fan I recently read the book Firestarter, and today rented Firestarter 1 and 2 at Blockbusters out of curiosity. Firestarter 1 was good, it stuck with the book's plot, it changed a few minor details and cut a few scenes as expected but much of the actual dialogue was just as the book word-for-word.... however when I put Firestarter 2 in the DVD player, I was cringing at every detail, the information isnt accurate, it's made a complete mess of the original movie, the flashbacks to "what happened" were totally different, everything from the way her mother was killed to what happened at the Manders Farm.

If you've never read the book or seen the first movie, you'll probably like it, but once you've read the book and gotten attached to the characters, you'll find this movie a huge disappointment.

Originally airing as a Sci-Fi Channel original movie/mini-series, "Firestarter 2: Rekindled" is the only sequel to "Firestarter," a little horror movie from 1984 that was based on a Stephen King novel and starred a very young Drew Barrymore as the title character. Arriving 18 years later and stretched out to nearly three hours, "Rekindled," re-writes history, re-making the previous film through flashbacks as it goes along. To say it takes liberties with its source material would be an understatement.

Since this is 2002, and Drew Barrymore has better things to do, the role of Charlie McGee has been re-casted with Marguerite Moreau, who will certainly ring a bell to fans of "The Mighty Ducks." Malcolm McDowell of "A Clockwork Orange" fame steps into the shoes of George C. Scott and looks even less Native American as John Rainbird, the manipulative megalomaniacal psychopath who exploited Charlie in the past and who, like Sam Loomis in "Halloween," can't shake his past obsessions, no matter what cost it comes at. Aside from spending the first half catching you up in case you didn't see the first movie (and offending you by assuming you are stupid if you have), "Rekindled" finds there to be more survivors of the "Lot 6" program, which used human beings to test mind-expanding drugs, which had an adverse effect on their psychological well-being. It's the job of Vincent Sforza (Danny Nucci) to track these people down so they can receive the rewards of a class action lawsuit (a.k.a. a brutal and swift cover-up death) and once he realizes something is awry, helps Charlie once again escape the clutches of Rainbird and his cronies, as well as fending off a group of genetically engineered "Super-Kids," who serve merely as plot devices and filler. Also, there's Dennis Hopper as a tortured psychic who was obviously only written into the script so that his name could appear in the credits, possibly lending credibility to this sequel.

All these little sub-plots do well enough to pad out the length of the "film," but for the most part, it follows the same "fox on the run" formula of the first. The flashbacks which serve to remake the first movie tend to bog things down and, in the end, are unnecessary and unfortunate. The fact of the matter is, for this movie to exist, nothing in the first movie needed to be re-written. The flashbacks were unnecessary because not only did they not add to the narrative at hand, but also because anyone watching a TV-movie/sequel should have at least seen the first movie or read the book. Thankfully, though, for a TV-movie, it's actually quite entertaining, despite some cheesy moments and obvious padding. There's a good hour that probably could have been cut from the flick, and it would have been all the better for it. On the upside, Marguerite Moreau is a nice replacement for Barrymore, even if she looks and acts nothing like her. Malcolm McDowell hams it up a bit, but at least gets into his role enough so that you believe he is truly insane. Dennis Hopper shows up, reads his lines and drives off, but his presence is still noteworthy. For a fan of the original "Firestarter" who doesn't mind seeing it violated just a bit, "Firestarter 2: Rekindled" serves as a nice way to kill a rainy afternoon. View it with a grain of salt, and you will find that despite its limitations and short-comings, it's actually not all that bad for a TV-movie. Truth be told, if they had billed the movie simply as "Firestarter: Rekindled," dropping the "2," the results would have been less offensive and it would be suitable as more of a remake than it is a sequel. Think of it as an overblown piece of fan-fiction on the small-screen, and it has its merits.

I did not watch this mini-series with very high expectations; mostly I watched it for the lovely Marguerite Moreau. I was not wrong, while Miss Moreau was effervescent; the plot of this movie was incomprehensible. Some items for your consideration:

-In the final showdown, unlike Firestarter the movie, the place she burns is a town. Weren't those innocent peoples shops and cars being blown up? Why did she do that? Charlie had better temper control as a child. She blew up an `evil' government installation, not someone's town.

-Why didn't she cook Rainbird at any of the many chances she had? I can understand not wanting to hurt someone if you don't have to, but I think that if I feared for my life, I would defend myself first and grapple with the emotional consequences later.

-How do they expect anyone who saw the movie Firestarter to believe that Rainbird survived? This girl could burn cinderblocks when she was five, I think a person who betrayed her she would have immolated.

-Who is watching the X-kids at the end? They are shown back in the company lab. Who took them there? Do the local authorities have any idea about what really happened? The one little boy in particular who `wanted a puppy' is a first order psychopath, with psychic powers. Who is his warder now?

-What exactly what was Dennis Hopper's purpose? I think they should have saved Hopper's salary and used it to hire a better writer. No offense to Dennis Hopper, a personal favorite of mine, but his character detracted from the plot rather than adding to it.

I hope this series does not count against Miss Moreau, I hope to see more of her in the future. She was great in Queen of the Damned.

I loved Malcolm McDowell in the new Fantasy Island. That was a chance for his singular offbeat personality to really shine.

I just think the actors had nothing to work with in this weak, weak script. Too bad they didn't offer me a chance to rewrite; a few minor changes and this could have been much better.

I've seen worse . . . and I've seen better. It's actually a decent sequel, especially considering it came almost 20 years after the original, but still it's far from perfect.

My biggest gripe would have to be the continuity flaws in the flashbacks; instead of flashing to footage from the original film, they shot some scenes to custom tailor to this film's needs . . . I can kinda understand the reasoning and wanting to be consistent with style. But the flashbacks don't always line up with the story told in the first film (at least, what I remember of the first FireStarter film).

Next, despite being 4 hours long, you never seem to get close to the characters. The narrative too frequently jumps from character to character to get the plot across that it never seems to stick long enough to make you sympathize with anyone, and when we do see them it's filled with lots of plot/character cliches that we expect from your typical story. It's really a shame since the cast seems very capable of diving much deeper.

Hopper's character is seen least, and interestingly was most memorable and deep in my mind. His quirky personality and looped speeches about the illusion of choices given in an almost ominous, allknowing (but reluctant) way . . . as good as the other actors are in this film, Hopper makes the best of the screen time he's given. His character has the Oracle essence that the Matrix films so desperately need.

Mixed feelings about the children . . . I do like the idea of the experiment on children and especially Cody's power. I didn't like how they felt like the little freak-show gang waiting to have a West Side Story brawl with Charlie. I think it would've been more effective with just Cody, or Cody and one other. The rest of the Children didn't add anything significant to the story line and just took up valuable development time.

The ending I didn't much care for either. Though the inferno was fine, the build up was all wrong. They could have pulled that ending off if some key changes were made, some key people surviving. I thought it would have been more interesting in Cody's obsession with Charlie's power threw a wrench in the works of Rainbird's plans and his own obsession.

In the end, I think it suffers from trying to do too much, cover too many characters, and really fails to convince us that what does happen can happen. (Charlie's sex life, for example). I think a few critical cuts and development changes would've made the climax work much better.

That's not to say Firestarter 2 is bad, it just doesn't quite hit the mark. The cast does well overall, the music is several notches above the first (as much as I like Tangerine Dream, this one's better.)

-J