Firestarter: Rekindled has a main character that can create fires with her mind, an ability that makes her more dangerous than any normal foe. The writer of this miniseries, Philip Eisner, knew that, and decided to make Charlie face a group of children who also have powers (one can read minds, another can create harmful soundwaves, a third can mentally "push" people to do his wishes, though without the attractive nosebleeds sported by Brian Keith in the original Firestarter). The most powerful of these children is capable of absorbing energy, an ability that makes him Charlie's theoretical match. The direction Eisner took is a reasonable one, but it doesn't work, for several reasons. The first is that Charlie's control over her ability changes from scene to scene, and, frankly, she doesn't have a brain in her head if she's been interested in her powers but yet hasn't figured out how to use them tactically over the course of twenty years. A second reason the script's direction doesn't work is what I term the Village of the Damned syndrome: you can tell me little kids are scary, but don't expect me to buy it. The kids do a lot of posturing, but only one of them (the one with the orange coat) is realitstic enough to be slightly threatening. By the movie's finale, a storm of gratuitous destruction that throws character motivations out the window, the kids have just become pitiful, and not in the way the script wants them to be.

Permit me to bring this unpleasant task to a close by talking about Firestarter: Rekindled's loss of control over its own ideas. Firestarter may have been about the psychic potential of human beings, but it was also grounded in genetic pseudo-reality. In Rekindled, some of the people's powers verge into super hero territory. The worst offender is Dennis Hopper's character, who was a subject in the original "Lot 6" experiment that granted powers to Charlie's parents, and has the ability to see past, present, and future. Practical omniscience is not an ability I'm willing to believe genetic manipulation would grant. Not only that, but Hopper's ability has almost no impact on the plot. It's not used cleverly at all, nor is it the source of any twists or surprises. The inclusion of another Lot 6 survivor also does zero except pad the plot. Both characters should have been excised completely from the movie; Firestarter: Rekindled might have benefitted from the restoration of focus such exclusions would have provided. All the series other problems aside, it definitely should have been three hours long and seems like it was stretched to four.