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FIRESTARTER 2: REKINDLED is a nearly 3 hour-long TV mini-series with a bloated storyline that could have easily been squeezed into an hour without losing anything important.

Charlie (Marguerite Moreau) is all grown up now, and plagued by nightmares of her past. There's also that pesky burning thing. Through some dark miracle of screenwriting, Rainbird (Malcolm McDowell) is alive and still obsessed with Charlie. He's also built an army of kids with various psychic abilities. They're sort of a brattier version of the kids in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.

Not-so surprisingly, Rainbird's got plans to use his brood as weapons. This leads up to the expected, all-too-wimpy showdown with Charlie. REKINDLED has far more smoke than fire, and feels almost endless to sit through.

Co-stars Dennis Hopper as Richardson, a clairvoyant with a personality like day-old oatmeal...

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.

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.

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

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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