Five Nights at Freddy's Review

Theatrical Movie Review - Horror/Video Game

I remember watching one of my kids playing the game “Five Nights at Freddy’s” years ago. I watched over his shoulder to get an idea of how to play, and then he let me play it a little bit. While the jump scare gimmick didn’t work particularly well for watching, trying to manage all of the resources while not getting mauled by an animatronic bear was way more stressful as a player. I wasn’t sure how this would translate to Emma Tammi’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie adaptation, but I hoped that the phenomenon could be a good time.

Mike (Joel Hutcherson) is caring for his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), a troubled young girl who struggles to communicate with her peers and is always drawing pictures. Mike has his own issues, having difficulty keeping jobs because of his dreams reliving his brother’s abduction years ago. He goes to see Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), a career counselor who suggests that he take a security job at Freddy Fazbear’s. Mike takes the job and befriends a local police officer, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who warns him to stay vigilant while working. Can Mike survive his time at Freddy’s?

From my understanding, as the games progress, they take themselves less and less seriously. I really wish that this movie had taken a page from the game, because more than anything, I found this movie incredibly boring. I recognize that I am probably not the target audience for this movie, given that I missed several of the cameos by prominent YouTubers who play the game online. Nevertheless, I still love horror movies, and I hoped this might take the route of “M3gan” from earlier this year that leaned into the camp and fun of its premise.

The performances were deeply underwhelming in this. They try to be earnest, but all of them just come across as utterly flat and dull. The characters with the most personality are the giant animatronic monsters with no facial expressions. 

Ultimately, that’s where this movie failed. The scenes with Freddy, Foxy, Chica, and Bonnie are easily the most fun, but they only show up for three scenes, and only one of them shows the quartet wreaking havoc the way we want. The game was built on jump scares, and the movie gives us maybe two ineffectual frights. 

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” has a lot working against it. It’s a video game, PG-13 horror movie. But it also had a lot of potential. It has a huge fan base, spectacular looking animatronics from the Jim Henson lab, and a simple premise that, if executed well, could be a fun time at the movie. Instead, it’s a plodding, tonally messy, bloated movie, more lifeless than Freddy himself. The animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s might be filled with ghost children, but this movie is just an empty shell.

This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on October 29, 2023.