‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’- Film Review: Should’ve Stayed as a Video Game

With Blumhouse Productions churning out surprises like M3GAN and their streaming release of Totally Killer but a lackluster move on The Exorcist: Believer, there was no chance their big screen treatment of Five Nights at Freddy’s won’t be as well-liked as the two movies I mentioned. It’s shocking how it took forever to get out of development hell for the last decade to make the popular horror video game series created by Scott Cawthon come to life. I never played them since I would be too scared. Still, I have watched older videos of the original Smosh Games crew playing them and know it led to countless comic and official guidebooks that come through our sorting machine at work practically every day. Based on the trailers and the fact it got slapped with a forced PG-13 to get the younger audiences to see, this won’t be the fright fest as promised despite a creepy concept. And I was correct, as Five Nights at Freddy’s is a misfire to come around this late in the Halloween season.

What’s the Story: Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is struggling to keep a steady job when he’s looking after his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and the risk of losing a custody battle with their Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson). His recent firing from mall security has him looking for anything quick. That comes when his career counselor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard) offers him an overnight position at an abandoned family dining establishment from the ’80s called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. There, Mike would be a security guard to keep anyone from breaking in. Not the job he wanted, he reluctantly takes it out of desperation since it doesn’t seem too hard to screw up. But what he wasn’t expecting upon his first night is to be disarmed of the restaurant’s animatronic mascots- Freddy Fazbear himself, Bonnie, Foxy, and Chica- that might be more sinister than they appeared.

Five Nights at Freddy’s lore sounds deep for fans to know more about. All I remember from various gameplays are the basics of when these animatronics inside this Chuck E. Cheese/Showbiz Pizza-type place get crazier as the night goes on, and you have to check your battery, leading to an effective jump scare if you fail. That alone sounds simple to make it still work on screen to where it could make for a suspenseful time on a supernatural level. Sitting through all of this in the comfort of my home on Peacock instead of the theater made me realize fans might respond more nicely to this adaptation because it unsuccessfully turns into an undaunting film that lost what made the games cool.

And there’s truth in saying it never scared me when director Emma Tammi (The Wind) doesn’t know how to build up any tension with these robots who can kill anyone. That suspense is lost when they don’t hide them in the shadows and have them out in the open, resulting in failed jump scares when they show up. Now, that’s not to say gore is the ultimate requirement to be scary; it would’ve helped a little. But everything felt too tame except for one death you could only see off-screen, unfortunately. Just the atmosphere of Freddy’s is perfect to create this sense of terror for our protagonist to be caught in, but it looked too cheap to find amusing. The one highlight to take away is they went all out on making Freddy and his friends come to life, thanks to the folks over at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, to make them look ideally like their video game counterparts and go for the CGI treatment.

But besides lacking in the horror department, there’s too much going on in here where it’s a matter of ever caring what unfolds next based on what to do with them. It might be a way to expand on the game so it wouldn’t just be about somebody in a claustrophobic room watching security cameras, yet lasting these five nights is survival in all its 109 minutes. The most they do is a sequence of taking out people who trashed the place and setting up a table fort with a little girl. We’re getting these dream sequences where Mike’s figuring out what happened to his little brother who went missing when he was a kid or having the talented Elizabeth Lali playing a cop named Vanessa who knows the restaurant’s history through needless exposition. Once it piles the supernatural kids into the mix, that interest in the mystery gets bogged down, making it easily incoherent to follow. If it was presented in the game, it wasn’t carried over here with its intended execution.

Josh Hutcherson is an actor I’ve always admired, so it was good to see him again after a long absence from the big screen. However, he is not at fault since nothing is compelling about his character, Mike, that makes you care about his relationship with his sister or how he handles the tragedy of his past, which seems to have been lifted from another film. And what a waste to cast Matthew Lillard, who barely had anything to do with his limited screen time. Not even Stu Macher/ Staggy could make some of this intentional dialogue sound right; the same goes for Mary Stuart Masterson, who’s also too good to be involved in this as essentially some kind of evil stepmother.

Maybe they tried their hardest to please the fandom by giving them what they wanted and being scared. From my perspective, it just does them dirty in never feeling like you’re playing the game, or not even seeing how M3GAN was a hit in how it intended to lean into the silly side occasionally. This doesn’t, which is baffling, considering Cawthon is credited as a writer on the film.

Although translating Five Nights at Freddy’s should have been simple, the film wasted its opportunity to provide both horror enthusiasts and novices with a version that isn’t frightening and takes itself too seriously. Even the usefulness of the impressive animatronics does not justify continuing to view this as total crap. Sadly, despite the day-to-day release strategy, this will make more money than other excellent films released this year, which might cause a sequel we’ll probably get next year because we’re dumb enough to see them.