Whatever it is that people find scary about the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game and assorted franchise is lost on me. I get it conceptually, the idea of creepy mascots in an abandoned family fun-house is a fine if not particularly inventive one; but from what I’ve seen of this title it’s really underwhelming -certainly the mascots of the game can’t hold a candle in terms of fright factor to the real ShowBiz Pizza animatronics they’re based off of. The popularity of this series always seemed a bit artificial -grown more out of the 80s nostalgia gimmick and internet memes than any level of quality to the game itself. But I’m not fit to judge that. I am however fit to judge its movie -finally released after nearly a decade of troubled development- and it is potentially the dullest movie I’ve seen all year.
Like another highly disappointing horror movie to release this month, Five Nights at Freddy’s was produced by Blumhouse, directed by newcomer Emma Tammi after Chris Columbus dropped out. Columbus had been a very deliberate choice -the man who launched his career in Hollywood by writing the screenplay for Gremlins, a movie it’s not hard to see a version of Five Nights at Freddy’s wanting to emulate in tone and style. But that wasn’t to be, the creative team of this finished version envisioning a more serious attempt at a horror movie -which winds up one of the movie’s most egregious flaws.
The central figure is Josh Hutcherson’s Mike Schmidt, a down-on-his-luck orphan struggling to raise his young sister with dead-end prospects and a bleak attitude. Needing a job and more money to retain custody in a fight with his bitter aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson), he accepts a job as a night security guard at an abandoned family restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza -shut down ‘sometime in the 80s’ after a bunch of kids, including Mike’s brother, disappeared.
If you can already tell where this plot goes you won’t be surprised by the fact that nothing in the movie is in any way inspired or unexpected. Is it any wonder who those kids are in Mike’s recurring dreams or what’s going to happen when that gang are sent by his aunt to sabotage the job? And that one notable actor who disappears for a large chunk of the movie, obviously he has a much bigger part to play in the climax… What hurts this more is that none of it is played with any degree of ingenuity or apparent investment, even on the part of the actors on screen. It’s fitting that we see so much of his dreaming experience because Hutcherson is barely awake for parts of this movie, while his co-stars are either similarly lacking in effort, like Matthew Lillard, or struggling, like Elizabeth Lail, to pull something of curiosity out of a fundamentally dry script.
The movie is exceedingly dismal in tone as it attempts in vain to wring genuine drama out of such a weak foundation. As a protagonist, Mike is terribly lacklustre, with so little motivation he initially doesn’t even care that much about Abby (Piper Rubio) being taken away from him -a complete ambivalence to start off the dramatic crux of his character arc. His past trauma and his demons are hardly handled organically either -the film not being interested beyond what they can contribute shallowly to the plot. Lail’s Vanessa is hardly better, a character whose function is to relate the lore surrounding Freddy’s and ultimately reveal herself as being connected to it. It’s really sterile lore too, for what’s supposed to be a very significant aspect of the game -coming down to essentially just a lamer version of the Nightmare on Elm Street backstory.
I won’t fault the source though as execution can make all the difference, and the script for this movie is particularly bad. Co-writer and game creator Scott Cawthon hasn’t written any screenplays beyond some little-seen Christian films, and that inexperience is extremely palpable here in how characters act and engage with one another. There’s no personality to speak of, the dialogue almost exclusively consists of what most directly moves the plot or character arc forward, peppered with dully reproduced tropes and a handful of jokes that are lame or lazy -written to that quip sense of perceptively cool sarcasm so common in blockbusters since The Avengers, and the latest demonstration of why such humour should be laid to rest. Abby is brought into the proceedings because kids in horror movies are a proven formula, but the attempts to make her precocious fall incredibly flat. Within minutes of her coming to Freddy’s, she, Mike, and Vanessa are given a goofy upbeat montage as they reset the electronics and animatronics around the restaurant. Of course Abby also befriends the robots possessed by the ghosts of dead children because other horror movies have done it, and the mascots themselves are gradually made out to be less hostile than assumed. None of it is played with much cohesion or even passion -you get the sense the director is trying her best to divert attention to the mascots the audience are there to see, but not finding anything of substance to them -only to go back to the people who offer even less.
In lieu of this constant drudgery, the least the movie could do is provide some scares, but there’s nothing honestly frightening to be found at all. What could have been there in terms of horror seems to have been scrubbed away by an apparent impetus for a more general appeal. Sequences where the mascots murder people are extremely tame, often happening off-screen with no gore to speak of and absolutely no sense of tension. The costumes themselves I guess are creepy, but increasingly less so the more we see of them as the movie goes along. There are no terrifying implications, no moody atmosphere, the film utterly fails to utilize the eeriness that comes with an abandoned empty family space. It doesn’t even try for your more conventional flurry of jump scares -perhaps in an effort to rise above them, but leaving the film without even the most hollow means of capturing the audience’s attention. It is a horror film produced by people who seemingly have never seen a horror film, and are guessing as to its attributes off of conjecture.
There is virtually nothing redeemable or interesting about Five Nights at Freddy’s, one of the most low-effort Hollywood movies in years. What might have made for a decent self-aware scary movie with a sense of fun has instead been reduced to a dry, aesthetically and technically inert slog -I would say that those involved deserved better, but they don’t seem to have cared much to begin with. It exists to manufacture an intellectual property for Blumhouse; and is another case of the end product of years of troubled development for a film being something bafflingly dreary and forgettable that not even the potential franchise can do much to save.
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