Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Lightyear (PG)

Lightyear (PG)

Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear is stuck on a vine-and-bug-filled planet but he still seeks to go “to infinity and beyond” in Lightyear, Pixar’s thought experiment about the origins of Buzz Lightyear.

Not the Toy Story Tim Allen-voiced toy Buzz Lightyear who was beloved by human child Andy and became best friends with fellow toy Woody. This is the character that toy was based on, as a title card explains, and we are watching the movie that Andy watched. So we in the audience are — in the Toy Story universe? It’s a concept that sort of pulls you through the looking glass if you think about it too hard.

Here, Buzz (voice of Chris Evans) and fellow Space Ranger Alisha Hawthorne (voice of Uzo Aduba) are crew members aboard a giant spaceship that is, I think, searching for life throughout the galaxy. He decides to investigate a promising-looking Goldilocks zone-type planet but this peaceful-seeming world is full of giant attack bugs and aggressive vines that try to pull people and the ship under the dirt. Buzz and Alisha, who along with a rookie (voice of Bill Hader) have gone exploring on the planet, barely make it back to the ship. When they take off, the pull of the vines makes the launch trajectory less than perfect, but Buzz is determined to clear a large mountain that the ship is suddenly heading right for.

And he almost does.

The crystal fuel cell that allows the ship to take off and to reach hyperspace traveling speeds breaks in the attempt to launch. Alisha tells her friend that they’ll wake up the scientists and other crew members in cryosleep and use the planet’s resources to regroup. After about a year, it seems that they have. Buzz boards a jet-ish spaceship to test a new fuel cell and slingshots around the planet’s nearby sun. But the fuel cell doesn’t quite make it up to speed and he returns to the planet to find that while he has only aged a few minutes the people back on the ground have aged four years.

Buzz is shocked — one crew member suddenly has a large beard, Alisha is engaged. But Buzz is determined to keep working on the fuel cell to try to fix the situation (the stranding of the ship, landing on the planet in the first place) that he feels deeply responsible for. So he goes up again and again. And comes back to learn that Alisha and her now-wife are expecting a baby, and then after a few more missions sees them celebrating their son’s graduation and then their celebrating their own multi-decade anniversary with their grown son and his partner looking on. And then one time Buzz comes back to find not Alisha but a recorded message she has left for him.

Through the decades (for everybody else) that only read as days or maybe weeks to Buzz, his constant non-aging companion is Sox (voice of Peter Sohn), a robot cat from Alisha. During one of Buzz’s brief stays, Sox asks what he can do to help Buzz out and Buzz offhandedly says Sox could figure out the whole fuel cell re-creation conundrum. It’s a big job, but Sox does have a lot of alone time in Buzz’s seldom-visited apartment.

While Buzz is laser-focused on getting off the planet and getting everyone “home” — to include a great many people who are probably a generation or two removed from wherever home was — the people on the planet seem to have largely lost interest in the fuel cell problem and are more focused on making life better there. Buzz takes one more desperate mission to prove that he can get the ship going again, but finds himself returning to a society facing threats from a mysterious ship and a bunch of robots called Zurg. Fighting the Zurg is a young woman with a familiar last name: Izzy Hawthorne (Keke Palmer), the now twentysomething granddaughter of Buzz’s old friend Alisha.

Sox, the movie’s standout supporting character, helps to amp up the kid-friendly silliness of the movie, which features a lot of adults talking. I’ve felt that some recent Pixar movies — Soul and Toy Story 4 come to mind — feel so invested in adulty-seeming characters and their adult, midlife problems about career fulfillment or being an empty-nester that I didn’t see the kid appeal of the story. Here, while there is a lot about Buzz learning to face up to a mistake and move on from it and learning to be part of a team, I feel like the movie approaches these rather complex concepts in kid-accessible ways. How do you deal with a mistake that you made without letting that mistake consume you? How do you live life from where you are now and move forward? I found myself being impressed with how the movie delivered these concepts in a way that I think kids (dealing with not making their travel soccer team or being in a different class from their bestie) will get, emotionally, even if it’s not something they could express in words.

Lightyear is, of course, beautiful to look at. It has a few truly lovely moments in space and in the sky. In particular, there is a shot with clouds that was stunning in the same way that the rendering of water in the short Piper was, where I may have actually said “wow” out loud.

Lightyear doesn’t grab you by the heart like recent Pixar offerings Turning Red or Luca. And while there’s nothing too frightening for younger kids — there are some scary robots, many of whom are also goofy, and some giant spiders — I did wonder if there was enough silliness or bounciness for kids younger than, say, 7 or 8 (Common Sense Media rated the movie as being for 6+ and they tend to be fairly accurate in their age assessments in my experience). It’s a nice movie, in the kindness sense, without being particularly delightful, and it’s a fun movie while still having moments that feel, if not sluggish exactly, just not as peppy as they could be.

Lightyear is not the most memorable Pixar offering but a perfectly acceptable option for families looking for entertainment and air conditioning. B

Rated PG for action/peril, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Angus MacLane with a screenplay by Angus MacLane (based on characters by Pete Docter & Andrew Stanton & Joe Ranft), Lightyear is an hour and 40 minutes long and distributed by Walt Disney Studios in theaters.

Featured photo: Lightyear.

Jurassic World Dominion

Jurassic World Dominion (PG-13)

Original Jurassic cast and new Jurassic cast collide in the underwhelming Jurassic World Dominion, the final movie in the Jurassic World trilogy and the conclusion of the six total Jurassic movies.

Wikipedia and other sources report that filmmakers say this is the final film of these two trilogies, but I have a hard time believing this is “The End” of this franchise. Something this long-running, and with CGI dinosaurs and not specific actors as the principal attraction, feels like it will always have reboot potential. You know — life finds a way.

Previous movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ended on a dark but interesting note (spoiler alert for that 2018 film): What if dinosaurs were suddenly reintroduced to the planet, not just in some controlled theme park but out in the wild with other animals and soft, squishable humans. Dominion takes that idea and, well, basically does nothing with it. Dinosaurs are out there running around on land and swimming in the world’s oceans. And there is also an illegal market in dinosaurs — but somehow none of that really seems to matter. Like, at the end of this movie, we see a kid just feeding a small dinosaur in the park, like it’s a friendly duck, and it’s no big whoop.

The big whoop of Dominion is actually an infestation of particularly large, aggressive locusts that are destroying huge chunks of farmland. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern!) figures out that these locusts have Cretaceous DNA and gets her old friend Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to go with her to Biosyn, the company that has the government contract to deal with all the loose dinos in the world and that, totally coincidentally, is the source of the seeds used in the only fields that the locusts won’t eat. Their colleague Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) works for Biosyn and has invited them to come visit him at the Biosyn facility in Italy where they have their dino preserve and also a building with multiple underground levels where you can do all sorts of shady DNA stuff.

Meanwhile, out in The Wilderness, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt), one-time coworkers at the revived but now-re-defunct Jurassic World theme park, are now an official couple and co-parents to Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a clone or something who they rescued in the last movie. In addition to being some kind of scientific marvel who is being hunted by poachers, Maisie is a sulky teen who wants to ride her bike wherever I want, Mom, because you can’t hide me in this off-the-grid cabin forever. Naturally, after one such tantrum, she is kidnapped, along with Beta, the small baby raptor of Blue, Owen’s raptor buddy who lives in the nearby wilderness. I’ll bring back your baby, Owen tells Blue — and to this movie’s credit, they do let Ian make fun of this later.

Eventually, all of these characters — along with bad-ass pilot Kayla (DeWanda Wise); scientist Henry Wu (BD Wong), who is always messing with DNA in these movies and, like, never learns, and Biosyn flunky Ramsay (Mamoudou Athie) — wind up at the Biosyn facility in Italy run by cartoonishly evil Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott, who never seems to completely land on which tech CEO he’s parodying).

There are, of course, plenty of scenes of dinosaurs chasing our characters — trained attack dinosaurs chasing a motorcycle-riding Owen through the streets of Malta, those dino-locusts swarming on a farm, a T-Rex on the hunt for meat. But there are also enough scenes of not-dinosaurs in this nearly two-and-a- half-hour movie that I found myself thinking “it’s been a while since we’ve seen any dinosaurs in this dinosaur movie.” There’s a lot of very goopy talk about genetics and humanity, a scene of people listening to Ian Malcolm just sorta riff in a lecture hall, a whole undercurrent about Ellie and Alan’s relationship that I think we’re supposed to find nostalgic and cute, the parenting dynamics of Owen and Claire, the genetically engineered Maisie dealing with the nature of herself (which the movie confuses more than it explains). When dinosaurs show up, it is at least nice to break away from these plots and people that I could never really bring myself to care about. But the dinosaur action also felt sort of muted; there was kind of an amusement park ride quality to some of the dinosaur scenes, as though we were riding through little tableaus about dinosaurs in the world without really engaging with them.

I’m sure that, side by side, these 2022 dinosaurs would look realer than the 1990s dinosaurs of the original movies, but this movie isn’t presenting them in any way that is significantly more exciting or visually arresting than back then. We don’t get any “clever girl” or raptors testing the fences moments here. And I felt nothing but eye-roll-y about the movie wanting me to root for the underdog T-Rex in a fight against the bigger badder Giganotosaurus. Yep, cool, I feel a really strong emotional connection to this one section of the green screen over this other section of the green screen.

Jurassic World Dominion was probably never going to be great but it had a setup that could have found its way to fun if it had built itself on the “dinosaurs in the human world” idea instead of getting all Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker about smooshing together separate trilogies and then basically putting the big climax back in a Jurassic Park-like setting. C-

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Colin Trevorrow with a screenplay by Emily Carmichael & Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World Dominion is an unnecessary two hours and 26 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Jurassic World Dominion.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (PG-13)

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (PG-13)

As ever, the Belcher family’s burger restaurant teeters on the brink while the Belcher kids involve themselves in hijinx in The Bob’s Burgers Movie, a fun feature-length presentation of the animated TV series.

Bob’s Burgers apparently just wrapped up its 12th season, which is probably something like 10 more seasons than I watched. I didn’t stop watching for any specific reason; it’s just one of those shows that fell off my regular viewing rotation list. This movie will likely put it back, especially since off-kilter but ultimately kind comedy is especially appealing to me at the moment.

As in the show, Bob Belcher (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, a vocal talent for the ages) and his wife, Linda (voiced by John Roberts), own Bob’s Burgers, a burger-based restaurant that always feels like it’s on the edge of closing. At the moment, the restaurant is literally one week from losing its equipment to repossession by the bank to whom the Belchers are behind on a loan payment. So things were looking rough even before a giant sinkhole opened right in front of the restaurant, making it hard for customers to even get inside.

The Belcher kids — eighth-grader Tina (voice by Dan Mintz), 9-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal) and somewhere-in-between brother Gene (Eugene Mirman) — like all kids both root for and pity their parents while dealing with various dramas of their own. Tina is struggling with whether to ask Jimmy Pesto Jr. (also voiced by Benjamin) to be her summer boyfriend. Gene is trying to keep a band together to play at an upcoming festival. Louise is worried that she might not be brave, and that the pink bunny-eared hat that she always wears really is, as a classmate says, a sign that she’s a baby.

Louise decides that the way to prove her badassedness is to video herself going into the sinkhole, which leads to the discovery of a long-buried body, which leads to murder charges for the burger restaurant’s building owner, Calvin Fischoeder (Kevin Kline). Fischoeder’s legal woes further imperil the restaurant, so Louise decides it’s up to her to save the family by proving that he is innocent and uncovering the real murderer.

Somewhere in the middle of watching this movie I realized that I was deeply enjoying two elements in particular: joke density and small nuggets of surprising earnestness. A concept regularly discussed on the podcast Extra Hot Great and in other TV commentary, joke density is the fast-and-furiousness of the jokes, not just the “set up, laugh” but the small asides, little nuances of delivery, bits of sight business and small gestures that can pack oodles of laughs into every minute of a TV show or movie. It’s been long enough since I watched Bob’s Burgers that I forgot that this is often a high joke density property, with layers of humor in every line. It keeps the energy up without being messily frenetic and, even though maybe it shouldn’t, it adds to the “genuine oddballs” nature of these characters. Though everything about the Belcher family should read as, well, cartoony, they feel tonally real because if you’re lucky, every family is a charming gang of weirdos who love each other in part because of their weirdness.

Which brings me to the earnestness. Like unexpectedly large chunks of cookie dough in your cookie dough ice cream, this movie had a few moments of familial sweetness that delighted me. Because of how un-saccharine these characters are, they can really sell these moments and grab you in the throat right in the middle of, say, a fart joke.

All this is packaged inside a bit of capering on the part of the adults — their schemes to keep the restaurant afloat lead to an unlicensed food cart and Linda dressed like a burger that for some reason is wearing a bikini — and vaguely Scooby-Doo-ish mystery adventure for the kids, what with their bike rides to the nearby amusement park on the wharf and their uncovering of secret passages. And there is a wonderfully fitting bit of song work that actually has to be quite skilled to seem as “we are not professional singers” as it is.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie doesn’t require in-depth knowledge of the series to enjoy it, just a willingness to get to know (or renew your acquaintance with) this delightfully relatable cartoon family. B+

Rated PG-13 for rude/suggestive material and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman with a screenplay by Loren Bouchard and Nora Smith, The Bob’s Burgers Movie is an hour and 42 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Twentieth Century Studios.

Featured photo: The Bob’s Burgers Movie.

Top Gun: Maverick (PG-13)

Top Gun: Maverick (PG-13)

Enjoy some long, lingering shots of military aircraft — old airplanes, new airplanes, airplanes going fast, airplanes doing crazy maneuvers — in the lookbook of sexy planes that is Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that also has some people, but mostly they’re incidental to all the cool airplanes.

Look, I like a flying machine as much as the next Josephine and, sure, the jets featured here are particularly cool, with all their aerobatic maneuvers. But this movie is way hotter for the airplanes than it is for any of the humans.

Good ole Pete Mitchell, a.k.a. Maverick (Tom Cruise), is still in the Navy, still smirking and ignoring orders and still flying faster than anyone on Earth, as one crew member says when he flies a hypersonic jet to Mach 10 despite being told to abort the experimental flight. (Because Maverick, who has got to be around Tom Cruise’s age of 59, is still a hot-shot pilot and not a crazy medical liability? Don’t think about it too hard, I guess.)

While that particular bit of insubordination should get him in some kind of trouble, instead he is sent to teach the young hot shot pilots the Top Gun fighter pilot training school. The Navy has only a few weeks to prepare for a mission to blow up some kind of secret nuclear facility in (unnamed) enemy territory. The mission involves flying through mountainous, anti-aircraft missile-studded terrain (it’s remarkably similar to the mission to blow up the Death Star) and Maverick is picked by his longtime friend, Admiral Tom Kazansky, Iceman (Val Kilmer), to be the one to teach the elite pilots who will go on the mission. The aggressively cocky pilots include Rooster (Miles Teller), as Lt. Bradley Bradshaw is known. The movie goes hard with some mustache styling and piano playing to convince us that Rooster is the son left behind by Goose, Maverick’s old friend and wingman who died in the first movie.

Maverick is nervous about training Rooster, whom he feels protective toward (and who also super hates Maverick), but takes the gig because Admiral Simpson (Jon Hamm) tells him this is his last chance to fly or something — those “Maverick and his superior officers” scenes don’t have much staying power. “Bark! bark! bark!” is how all of Hamm’s dialogue sounded to me.

Meanwhile, Maverick has a lady friend named Penny (Jennifer Connelly). She owns the bar everybody hangs out in, she has a daughter (not Maverick’s), they have a past and she’s basically happy to see Maverick again. She is not a person with an interior life and a personality beyond “bar owner who awkwardly kisses Maverick.”

We are still light on big movie star event films and this is definitely that, Tom Cruise being The Last Great Movie Star, as so many movie-critic-types have observed lately. While this isn’t his most personable or captivating role ever, it isn’t off-putting. And I have a soft spot in my heart for nostalgia — I loved the “let’s do original Star Wars again!” vibe of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and I am very excited for the forthcoming fifth season of Cobra Kai, which isn’t so different from Top Gun: Maverick in that it takes some iconic 1980s characters and catches up with them in the present. But from the initial cowbell-gong noises (you know the one) and “Danger Zone,” this movie started to wear me out.

While Cobra Kai has let those Karate Kid characters grow and let the world around them change and just generally has some perspective on itself, Maverickand Maverick are still solidly stuck in the mid 1980s. Sure, the Karate Kid movies were underdog stories and Top Gun comes from a more muscley overdog-type place, but they both existed in the very particular 1980s-y culture at roughly the same time. Top Gun: Maverick, though set in the now, feels like it is still there, still doing 1986, without even any “kids these days” differences between the pilots then and the pilots now. There is little sign that Maverick has in any way grown or lived a life for the last 35 years. The only acknowledgment that time has passed for him and that we’re in the present is when various people say the word “drones.”

If you go to this movie in the theater and have fun, that’s fine. The shots of two planes spiraling around each other or whipping through canyons are cool and are a pretty good argument for seeing things on a big screen. And the movie has a very kind Val Kilmer cameo.

If you wait and see this movie at home some Saturday evening, that is also fine — stunts aside, it is maybe, with the opportunity to rewind and to have “hey, remember in the first movie when” conversations, even the more fun way to view this movie. The movie itself feels C+ in its non-airborne moments, but I’d go to a B- if you really like planes and miss being at air shows.

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Joseph Kosinski with a screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, Top Gun: Maverick is two hours and 11 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Featured photo: Top Gun: Maverick.

Downton Abbey: A New Era

Downton Abbey: A New Era (PG)

The Crawley family (hanging on to their country house and British nobility trappings in interwar Yorkshire) deal, as ever, with the encroachment of modernity, family secrets with inheritance-related implications, potential health crises and some rather meekly drawn romantic entanglements in Downton Abbey: A New Era, a theatrically released sequel that has the feel of a double episode of the TV series.

Can you just show up at Downton Abbey having never before visited with Lord Grantham, a.k.a. Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), and his American wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), and their politely sniping daughters, Mary (Michelle Dockery) and Edith (Laura Carmichael)? Maybe. There isn’t so much context needed here that you won’t get the “this moment is sad” or “this moment is shocking” melodrama that drives the story. But I think you might be a bit lost in all the below-stairs characters and random children and spouses, both seen and unseen.

The movie starts with the marriage of Tom Branson (Allen Leech) to Lucy (Tuppence Middleton), secret daughter of Maud (Imelda Staunton), who was some kind of fancy Crawley cousin we met in the last movie. (If there was a title card to tell us when we are, I missed it but Wikipedia says the year is 1928.) Tom, widower of a third Crawley daughter, learns shortly after the wedding that Sybbie (Fifi Hart), his daughter from that first marriage, has been designated as the inheritor of a villa in the south of France. Violet (Maggie Smith), Robert’s mother and the matriarch whose cutting world view has run the family until recently, has herself recently inherited the villa from a man she knew years ago (exactly when she knew him and what “knew” means becomes a bit of intrigue). Violet’s intention is to give young Sybbie a future inheritance similar to the rest of her generation of titled and monied cousins but the existence of the villa and this mysterious French man has the family in a tizzy. The man’s son, Montmirail (Jonathan Zaccai), invites Robert and Tom to France to check out the property and solidify Sybbie’s inheritance position. Ultimately, Robert brings a whole posse: Cora, Tom, Lucy, Maud, for no particular reason Edith and her husband Bertie (Harry Hadden-Paton), lady’s maid Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy), valet Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) and, mostly to get him out of the hair of the Downton people, butler emeritus Mr. Carson (Jim Carter).

Their absence from Downton corresponds with the arrival of a movie crew that has offered a roof-fixing amount of money to shoot on location. Mary accepted the offer and stayed to oversee the situation. She strikes up a friendship with director Jack Barber (Hugh Dancy), who is making a silent film with stars Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock) and Guy Dexter (Dominic West) just at the moment when talkies are starting to crush the silent films at the box office. This is particularly worrisome for Myrna, who has the look of glamor and refinement but the voice of her more humble background. Goings on with this group include Downton staff Daisy (Sophie McShera) and Anna (Joanne Froggatt) being star-struck (and then disenchanted with the real-life star), Jack and Mary’s friendship (with “maybe more” flickerings as Mary deals with the disappointment of an absent husband — I guess Matthew Goode could not fit even a last-minute appearance in his schedule for this go-around), Guy Dexter’s wooing of current Downton butler Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), and Mr. Molesley’s (Kevin Doyle) unexpected prowess as a screenwriter.

Looking back at this description, I can see how I’ve just listed a lot of “who cares” if you’ve never watched the TV show. Thinking “ha, good for you Molesley” or “is Thomas going to find happiness?” is probably the principal source of enjoyment for this movie. Yes, fitting in all of these little bits of story for supporting characters does at times feel scattershot, and many stories don’t seem to get the development they’d deserve. (In particular, the Thomas Barrow/Guy Dexter maybe-romance feels a little underbaked, perhaps the result of not wanting to entirely write Thomas out of any future stories?) But to some extent what we’re watching is a season run at triple speed, not necessarily a stand-alone story.

The movie does manage to craft a few quiet moments between two characters with emotional history. We get nice conversations between Violet and Isobel (Penelope Wilton), between Mary and Mr. Carson, between Robert and Cora. These moments are only meaningful if you have the context of the series to draw from, but for fans they offer a nice little treat.

This latest Downton has a lot in common with your standard Marvel movie, with its bits of fan service and Easter eggs of past plot lines. And like a middle-of-the-road Marvel entry, it does what it needs to do without necessarily doing anything new or different or exciting. Want to cheer for some favorite characters and triumphs big and small? Downton Abbey: A New Era fills the bill just fine. B

Rated PG for suggestive references, language and thematic elements (though this movie is way tamer than even the series ever was), according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Simon Curtis with a screenplay by Julian Fellows, Downton Abbey: A New Era is two hours and four minutes long and distributed by Focus Features

Featured photo: Downton Abbey: A New Era.

Firestarter (R)

Firestarter (R)

Things get toasty when a young girl gets angry in Firestarter, a new adaptation of the Stephen King novel.

Based on some light Wikipedia-ing, this does seem to be an entirely new riff on the book and not some universe-continuation something with the 1984 Drew Barrymore version. There is an early 1980s vibe attached to this movie, even though the first date we see on the screen is from footage of college students Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) and Andy (Zac Efron) being interviewed on some scratchy video from way back in technologically primitive, er, 2008? Also, when we meet little girl Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), she may be pouty about not having wi-fi and smart phones but her clothes seem straight out of the E.T. wardrobe department, which adds to the movie’s overall out-of-time feel.

Vicky and Andy are technology-eschewing parents living in a small Maine town who disagree about whether their middle-school-ish daughter Charlie needs to “push it down and bury it” (Andy’s point of view) or “learn to control it” (Vicky’s preference). The “it” is the catchall for Charlie’s abilities, the most worrisome of which is her ability to start fires with her mind. Or rather, her not-quite-controllable tendency to start fires when she gets really mad. I guess she had been “pushing it down” but lately she finds that peer bullying about her weirdness is getting to her, leading to a little explosion in the school bathroom.

As Vicky and Andy had always feared, this incident puts Charlie on the radar of the government agency that had a hand in the college experiment that gave Vicky and Andy their powers (or heightened preexisting powers or something). Vicky had simply stopped using her telekinesis but Andy had used his ability to psychically “push” people to give people hypnotism-like smoking cessation treatments (but for cash only, one of his many “stay off the grid” procedures). The parents worry that Charlie’s abilities, with her since birth, will make her a test subject (and maybe worse) for the government that will hold her hostage for the rest of her life. They intend to take off, running and disappearing as they always have, but they are not quick enough to escape Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes), another person with superhuman abilities sent by the shady Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben) to bring in Charlie and her parents.

Most of the powers of the people here are activated via staring — there’s a lot of close-ups on eyes, a lot of times we see Charlie squint or glare before something explodes. If a staring-heavy movie is playing it straight (which this movie is), there isn’t going to be a lot of room for deep character insights and subtle performances. Everybody here is basically fine, giving it their mostly-all. Reuben is an entertaining villain-in-a-suit; Efron brings the slightest whiff of humanity to “dad of main character.”

“Low-fi” is the description that settled into my brain about this movie, from the score that had occasional Casio-like notes to the opening credits that gave very Halloween-movies-remake vibes to the wardrobe choices to the pacing to the, well, everything. Perhaps for that reason, the movie never felt like it was asking all that much of me nor did I find myself expecting all that much from it. Slightly above average pizza, $12 per bottle red wine and this movie all feel like they are operating on the same level — sort of comfortable and enjoyable without being in any way stand-out — and feel like they create the natural combination for how this movie is best viewed. You need to watch something/eat something/drink something effort-free after a long week and this movie needs you to be not super picky about plot or acting expectations. C+

Rated R for violent content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Keith Thomas with a screenplay by Scott Teems, Firestarter is an hour and 34 minutes long and distributed by Universal Studios in theaters and via Peacock.

Featured photo: Firestarter.

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