Firestarter 2: Rekindled Reviews

Eighteen years after the release of the theatrical film FIRESTARTER (1984), this made-for-cable follow-up picked up the story of Charlie McGee (played in the first film by Drew Barrymore and here, as a college student, by Marguerite Moreau), who's blessed/cursed with pyrokinesis — the ability to start fires with her mind. Several decades ago, John Rainbird (Malcolm McDowell) exercised his God-complex under the aegis of the top-secret Project Radiant Thunder, a program designed to detect and harness paranormal mental abilities. Although the majority of his experiments were inconclusive, he could claim one undisputed triumph: Charlie McGee. Rainbird executed Charlie's parents and tried to take their place, prompting the child to use her awesome powers to flee his government-funded medical facility. Still a firestarter, Charlie lives in fear of being sucked back into Rainbird's research. Meanwhile, insurance investigator Vincent Sforza (Danny Nucci) is assigned to locate survivors of Project Radiant Thunder; his boss tells him he's rounding up claimants to a class action lawsuit, but unbeknownst to Vincent, his firm's real business is murder for hire. If word were to leak out about Rainbird's earlier botched experiments, he'd lose funding for his latest government-approved brainstorm: The wartime capability of ESP-enhanced children. When Vincent catches up to Charlie, she's working on a thesis involving the very study in which she was a participant; her research is based on access to recently declassified documents about Rainbird's study. Although she quickly develops a crush on Vincent, she's reluctant to share her research and to act on her feelings, since her firestarting abilities are unpredictable and physical intimacy might inadvertently trigger them. Unfortunately, Vincent inadvertently leads his amoral coworkers to Charlie, and another Project Radiant Thunder alumnus (Dennis Hopper) enters the picture just long enough to betray her. The recaptured Charlie resists cooperating with Rainbird, who retaliates by commanding his grade-schoolers to suck out her powers — her only hope of escape lies in using her powers to vanquish his new crop of mental monsters. Though this overlong tale mostly regurgitates King's source material, McDowell and Moreau bring real conviction to their Svengali-Trilby roles; the film's only other assets are the incendiary special effects and the camp value of poor Charlie's literally sizzling sex scenes.