Even when “Five Nights at Freddy’s” was a video game, the franchise has always been watched more than it has been played. A tiny budget indie game released unceremoniously in 2014, the original point-and-click title’s gameplay loop amounts to little more than viewing security camera feeds, occasionally pressing a few buttons to turn on some lights and close some doors. But Scott Cawthon’s passion project, created after the developer cut his teeth on Christian-themed games (seriously), became a phenomenon through a barrage of reaction videos that spread on social media of players shrieking at the jump scares that give the otherwise quiet title some moderate spark.
In that context, the film adaptation’s simultaneous release in theaters and on Peacock, usually a sign of little confidence in a project, feels oddly fitting. Streaming replicates the solo terrors of playing through the game on your PC, while going to theaters helps provide the communal scares that turned the franchise into a sensation.
There’s just one problem: it’s hard to imagine anyone, even the younger audience that truly made “Five Nights at Freddy’s” popular, reacting strongly to anything happening onscreen in director Emma Tammi’s middling, pulseless film version of the game. The original “Five Nights” might not exactly be a horror videogame masterpiece on the level of your “Resident Evils” or “Silent Hills,” but credit where it’s due, there’s an undeniable cheap thrill appeal to the sudden flash of a decaying animatronic teddy bear gnawing menacingly at your laptop screen. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” can’t even provide that: the singular jump scare it has is a comedic fakeout. The PG-13 bore instead feels like an awkward marriage of a real horror film and a kids Halloween movie, with absolutely zero of either genre’s strengths making it into the slog that’s created.
After a literally never mentioned again intro that brings to mind what would happen if a “Saw” film wasn’t Rated R (answer: it would suck), “Five Nights at Freddy’s” lumbers into the backstory that will fill up way, way too much of its screen time. Josh Hutcherson is Mike, a menial worker struggling with trauma™ involving his brother’s childhood kidnapping and a picture-perfect family that goes on idyllic Nebraska camping trips. In the present, he’s a jumpy adult who gets canned from his mall security gig after attacking a father he mistakes as a kid-snatcher (if you think the film would explore this violent streak in any interesting way, put those hopes to rest), he ends up at the desk of an abrasive career counselor (Matthew Lillard, so obviously telegraphing that his character is more than he appears it feels insulting to your intelligence). The job he’s offered has bad pay and worse hours: play night-time security guard at an old, long-closed family entertainment center Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where his only company is the busting apart animatronics of the titular cartoon bear and his musical band. As the only guardian of his significantly younger sister Abi (Piper Rubio), he initially declines the role on account of its late hours.
But he also has a Type A aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson, the only person in the film having any sort of fun) breathing down his neck about custody over Abi, and with very few options, he eventually bites on the offer. The gig initially doesn’t seem too bad, mostly entailing taking a bunch of naps in the security room (meticulously crafted to resemble the grimy little one in the original game). But two facts soon become apparent over the five nights he keeps the job. The first is that Freddy — along with bunny Bonnie, chicken Chika, and pirate fox Foxy — looks creepy as hell on their rinky-dink stage at night. The second is that they’re also alive.
It sounds like a decent setup for a ridiculous but fun slasher in the vein of something like “M3gan,” playing things mostly straight but with a winky knowingness that shows it’s in on the joke. The issue is that the film, bizarrely, doesn’t go to that very obvious place. The movie withholds scares or danger from the animatronics for a long time, in what initially feels like an attempt at a slow burn but instead reveals itself to be a severe miscalculation of how much horror needs to be in a film for it to actually be a horror film. Aside from a completely plot-superfluous mid-film sequence involving Abby’s babysitter Max (Kat Conner Sterling) and her brother busting into the center late one afternoon that provides the one and only memorable kill “Five Nights at Freddy’s” offers, all actual suspense and action involving murderous cartoon robots is pushed back into the film’s last 20 minutes. Filling out the rest of the film is, mostly, a whole lot of nothing.
Tammi, a horror director whose previous work includes solid entries in the Hulu anthology series “Into the Dark,” wrote the movie with Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, and most of the film’s failings stem from a truly dead-on-arrival script. The screenplay has the pacing of a zombie, dragging its feet to an hour-and-fifty-minute runtime with a story that couldn’t support 90 minutes of intrigue. Those extra minutes can be attributed to insane repetition; there are so many flashbacks and dream sequences of the camping trip where Mike’s brother disappeared that you end up seeing the damn Nebraska forest more than you actually see Freddy Fazbear. The script often feels quite literally intended for children in how aggressively it handholds, foreshadowing so clunkily and obviously that any clue about the climax is impossible to miss (if you somehow don’t pick up on the fact that drawings will end up a plot device after Abi’s teacher gives an extremely long speech about how important art is to child development for no reason, godspeed to you).
With such poor material to work with, all the actors are left completely out to dry. Hutcherson is totally vanilla as Mike, who has so little character to grab onto that it’s hard to imagine anyone registering in the role. Elizabeth Lail of “You” fame is more robotic than Freddy and his pals as mysterious cop Vanessa, but the character is so poorly written, both unnecessarily withholding and so obviously hiding things, that no passion from any actor could make her anything but infuriating. The extended time on Mike’s backstory and his relationship with Abi fails at the basic task of investing the audience in their dynamic because Abi is a complete non-character. Early on, her aunt’s insensitive comment that she’s “mentally ill” suggests that the young girl has some sort of special needs or behavioral issues; the script doesn’t bother to provide her even a smidgeon of specificity by clarifying.
Even when the movie finally gets out of the backstory rut it needlessly digs itself into and offers the basic experience you’d expect from a “Five Nights at Freddy’s” adaptation, it fails to truly satisfy. The direction bungles potential suspense through awkward cuts and staging that is both overly obvious (Freddy and friends often just appear in frame instead of receiving proper build-up) and frustratingly vague (the geography of Fazbear’s Pizza is never laid out clearly). The animatronics themselves are faithfully recreated from the games, but in live-action instead of the original muddy graphics, they look shiny and brand-new instead of beat-down and barely operational, like freshly modeled designs rather than anything with real character. The same can be said of the film’s production design and aesthetic, which can best be described as sub-“Stranger Things” ’80s-core, with only the opening arcade-inspired credits having anything resembling real juice. If part of the appeal of the original game was its scrappy, low-budget charm, the movie feels antiseptic, with no grit or grime that could give it flavor or identity of its own.
A film about a haunted Chuck E. Cheese clone doesn’t exactly need to be complex to be watchable. But “Five Nights at Freddy’s” somehow misses the arcade for the flashback forest, undercutting the obvious appeal of animatronic cartoon characters as menacing slasher villains by refusing to ever become a real horror movie. The result feels like one of the sleeping pills Mike downs during his security shifts, too bloodless and biteless to provoke the YouTube freakouts the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” name is most known for. Even non-gamer filmgoers would be better served staying at home and looking up two-hour “Five Nights at Freddy’s Reactions” videos. There’s infinitely more scares to be had that way.
Grade: D
Universal Pictures will release “Five Nights at Freddy’s” in theaters and on Peacock October 27.
