L'incendiaria

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

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The Sci Fi Channel almost had a hit with "Firestarter: Rekindled."

Almost.

For those who read the Stephen King novel or has seen the 1984 movie version of the novel with Drew Barrymore, stop right where you are. They have taking a HUGE liberty with both. In the novel, there were only 3 remaining subjects of the Lot 6 program (Charlie's parents and Richardson). This version has an agency that is bumping off the original participants by promising a cash settlement from the program. Danny Nucci plays Vincent Sforza, working for the agency in finding these people, although her doesn't know what happens once they're found. One of the people on the list is Charlie McGee, now a young woman (Marguerite Moreau). Seems that Charlie has some issues of her own. Whenever she gets "excited," she gets VERY hot, so hot that things catch fire (In one instance, she smolders an entire hotel room). She's also been living her life on the run ever since her parents were killed by the government agency known as The Shop. One of their operatives, Rainbird (Malcolm McDowell), wants Charlie, even after she turns him into a charred lunatic. He wants Charlie bad enough to kill (And he likes using a pencil as a weapon!). He's also done something else with the Lot 6 experiment: 6 boys with individual powers (One is an energy vampire, another with a killer voice)that are being used to create an ultimate weapon.

A lot of questions were left unanswered: What happened to The Shop and the Manders? There are a lot of plot holes: Are we supposed to swallow the fact that Rainbird who, in both the novel and 1984 version was burnt to a crispy critter, yet manages to survive without looking MORE disfigured? And what's the thing with Richardson(A bored looking Dennis Hopper)? He doesn't really serve any real purpose other than to claim that he knows what's going to happen. They recreate Charlie's early story rather than use the footage from the original to keep the story in balance, also changing her parent's fate.

If you could get over these problems, then you could really enjoy the film on a decent level. If you're a purist of the novel and the 1984 version, then you are going to spend all of your time picking the film apart. The saving grace is the 6 boys. They don't know the real story behind Rainbird, that they could possibly end up in the same situation as Charlie.

What the heck was this movie?? A rejected script for X-Toddlers?? That is the only thing that i kept asking myself through out the long duration of this horrible thing.

I must admit that i have never read the book, but i am a fan of the original film. This film ALL but erases the existence of it. Let's change the entire ending of a movie and make another and call it a sequel. That is exactly what has happened here. With the additions of the little village of the damned mutant children making it so far out there it was borderline comedy. The two good things out this film were the actress who played Charlie who was actually a good actress, just the wrong film for her. Danny Nucci was good as always. But they could not save this horrid thing.

Stay away from it or you will wish you were set on Fire.

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.