★★★1/2 Second version of Stephen King’s novel (the first, in the eighties and directed by Lewis Teague, starring Drew Barrymore) about a girl with the power to generate fire with her mind, about her parents who try to hide her and teach her to control that force, and from a government agency that tries to use her as a weapon. O tempora, o mores: at the time, the novel Firestarter was a combination of Carrie and The Dead Zone, mixing puberty with politics. Today this story is close to a dark version of a superhero story (a bit like Chronicle or Son of Darkness, which imagined an evil Superman), although the treatment tries to follow the constants of horror movies. But what remains is a kind of X-Men movie. It is not the fault of the precise and effective direction of Keith Thomas but of how stories can be “read” today, especially in the cinema. For the rest, the film has the advantage of lasting just enough and not drifting more than necessary; and the disadvantage of sometimes telling us the social context in an underlined way so that we have no doubts about where the bad guys are, when the original was much, much more ambiguous. By the way, Zac Efron shows that he is not a bad actor at all, although we must also admit that his dialogue is not one of the most inspired that the seventh art has given.
