Five Nights At Freddy's (2023)

By: Mike Ward on Thursday, October 26

PG-13 Running Time: 110 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

After years and years of waiting, fans of the Five Nights at Freddy’s videogame franchise and “Freddy-verse” finally have their big screen cinematic movie experience moment.
You have options. If a theater isn’t an option for you, the film has also been released at the same time on the Peacock streaming service.
For a relatively tight $25 million budget, Five Nights at Freddy’s boasts some impressive visual effects work from The Jim Henson Company with animatronics and puppetry.

NO

Play the games. They will make you tense, anxious, and deliver everything that the film fails to do.
Focuses on the wrong things - for the few moments you get of the robots running amok, you get multiple more scenes of family drama and strife. So the question remains; What exactly are you paying to watch here?
Unfortunately a disappointment through and through. Lacks scares. Lacks jump scares. The convoluted screenplay does not allow for characters to create tangible chemistry. Two performances are so over-the-top, you wonder if they got a different script then everyone else. Simply a major misfire and letdown.

OUR REVIEW

A popular video game franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s has developed and maintained a massively devoted fanbase over the last decade through the creation of nine video games and a series of spin-off games, as well as merchandise, books, toys, and an entire fictional universe devoted to expanding the Freddy’s lore.

Amplified by YouTubers who built their brand on streaming the playing of the game, Five Nights at Freddy’s is something of an organic, grassroots success. Certainly, when creator Scott Cawthon conceived the game, he did so partly out of frustration. His previous game designs failed to connect with audiences and received poor reviews. When one noted reviewer claimed his latest game and characters were “unintentionally terrifying,” Cawthon decided he would take one more shot at game creation. He filled Five Nights at Freddy’s full of scenes which amplified fear and dread, created lots of jump scares, made the jump scares integral to outcomes in the game, and found a way to freak out and terrify a lot of gamers.

Yet somewhere along the way, in the eight years it has taken for Five Nights at Freddy’s to move from the small screen to the big screen, the film has become a benign cinematic experience. A “horror” film which lacks any horror, this version of Freddy’s is largely a jump scare-free viewing experience, and a movie that focuses on family drama and tensions rather than delivering what a large number of people are expecting.

Blood? Meh. Animatronic creatures destroying all who cross their path? Kind of. Bleak scenes which draw out fear and terror, causing us to cinch up in our seats? Nope.

In this iteration, Freddy’s is basically a children’s suspense movie, with a couple of moments which necessitate the PG-13 rating. I mean if that’s the approach, isn’t this why we have Goosebumps?

Director Emma Tammi (The Wind) understands how to set a deliberate pace and establishes a slow, almost metronomic cadence with her film. To her credit, she surveys pretty much every nook and cranny of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-like playground restaurant overseen by Steve (Matthew Lillard). A career counselor, Steve meets our main protagonist, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), who is desperate to find a job as circumstances have led to his having custody of young sister Abby (Piper Rubio).

Steve offers Mike a graveyard shift security job at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza and one night Mike uncovers an animatronic jam band that seems to perform “Talking In Your Sleep” - the 1980s hit song by The Romantics. Unsettled, Mike certainly has no idea that these creepy animatronic robots will seemingly come to life and attack anyone who crosses their path.

The animatronics, a combination of puppetry, actor movement and visual effects work, is largely the product of The Jim Henson Company. Perhaps most frustrating is that you can see how detailed and intentional the work was to make these creatures look and feel so sinister and menacing. Unfortunately, the film simply fails to deliver on that potential.

While there is ample opportunity to explore the lore behind the creatures, and we do get a backstory on what brings the animatronics to life, we also spend significant time watching Mike shuffle around. He keeps having a recurring dream of an incident from his youth, when, at a picnic years before, his younger brother Garrett was abducted by a stranger, driven away in a car and never to be seen again. A number of young kids appear in Mike’s dreams and communicate with him. And while lines blur between dreamscape and reality, everything becomes increasingly convoluted when Abby starts drawing pictures and images which directly correlate to what Mike is seeing in his dreams and in his time spent at the pizzeria.

Hutcherson’s one-dimensional performance is hard to sustain over 110 minutes when you don’t have a lot of backup. Rubio, with bountiful youthful exuberance is definitely enigmatic on screen. However, she struggles to elevate the material and often says her lines with a lack of range. A third major character emerges in the form of police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). She arrives after noticing Mike serving as the latest security guard at Freddy’s. Initially, Vanessa knows more than she lets on and eventually warms to Mike, even if Lail and Hutcherson generate almost zero chemistry in much of their time together on screen.

Attempts at humor are amusing at best. Mike’s vengeful aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson, in a completely different movie than everyone else) wants custody of Abby and becomes a painful thorn in Mike’s side. It merely generates more moping on Mike’s part. On top of that, we are left to try and figure out how old Mike is supposed to be when compared to his 8-year-old sister (Hutcherson, 31, looks like he should be playing Abby’s father not her big brother). Then, you fold in the family drama which dominates a screenplay that should be a carnival funhouse of chills, scares, kills, and frights.

One would be remiss to not acknowledge that Tammi’s film offers plenty of fan service, a hint of a sequel, a couple fun cameos for the Freddy’s diehards, and a few things to look for during the end credits. Yet, the film is also dull, overlong and the tension largely absent.

Released both in theaters and the streaming service Peacock on the same day, one wonders if Universal Pictures lacked faith in the final product. Sadly, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a milquetoast viewing experience, with Tammi unable to determine just what kind of movie she truly wants this to be.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio, Elizabeth Lail, Matthew Lillard, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kat Conner Sterling, David Lind, Christian Stokes, Joseph Poliquin, Lucas Grant, Kevin Foster, Jade Kindar-Martin, Jess Weiss

Director: Emma Tammi
Written by: Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback, Emma Tammi (screenplay); Scott Cawthon, Chris Lee Hill, Tyler MacIntyre (screen story)
Based on the video game series “Five Nights at Freddy’s” by Scott Cawthon
Release Date: October 27, 2023
Universal Pictures/Peacock

After years and years of waiting, fans of the Five Nights at Freddy’s videogame franchise and “Freddy-verse” finally have their big screen cinematic movie experience moment.

You have options. If a theater isn’t an option for you, the film has also been released at the same time on the Peacock streaming service.

For a relatively tight $25 million budget, Five Nights at Freddy’s boasts some impressive visual effects work from The Jim Henson Company with animatronics and puppetry.

Play the games. They will make you tense, anxious, and deliver everything that the film fails to do.

Focuses on the wrong things - for the few moments you get of the robots running amok, you get multiple more scenes of family drama and strife. So the question remains; What exactly are you paying to watch here?