Video game adaptations have been big-business at the box office this year. First The Super Mario Bros Movie broke enough bricks to earn over one-billion in gold coins and now Five Nights at Freddy’s is shattering records while scaring its way to becoming one of the most financially successful horror films in recent memory. Still, the stench of the video game adaptation curse looms over cinemas, and no amount box office success can wash the stink off of Freddy’s.

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Five Nights at Freddy’s Plot

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is doing his best to raise his ten-year-old sister. He’s struggling to maintain a steady job and is consumed by guilt stemming from the abduction of his younger brother that occurred when they were children. After assaulting an innocent man that he believed to be a kidnapper, Mike must take a job as night-time security for the long-closed children’s restaurant Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. While desperately searching for answers to the disappearance in his dreams, Mike also comes to the realization that there may be more to his easy security gig than he anticipated.

The Critique

I’ll begin by saying that Matthew Lillard is a gift, and I’ll allow no besmirching of his name. His presence — although far too brief — is one of the few highlights in a film that feels as robotic and soulless as Freddy Fazbear himself. I’ve never played the video games, but I was (of course) aware of them prior to my viewing. It’s concept is one I found interesting, and after seeing the practical creature design brought to life by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, I was all the more intrigued.

Unfortunately, Five Nights at Freddy’s takes its impressive cast and mesmerizing monsters and drowns them in a cheaply constructed story overflowing with clichés and drastically differing tones. Rather than centering the animatronic killers at the core of its plot, the film places an unlikable and unrelatable 30-something with past trauma in the spotlight, while attempting to balance Freddy and his pals in the background. It’s a choice that manufactures what feel like two entirely different movies and then sloppily attempts to force a convergence.

Five Nights at Freddy’s lacks any believable attempt at scares, sidestepping its horror elements in favor of a disingenuous and repetitive family subplot. The animatronics don’t stalk their prey or lurk in the shadows. They walk around freely in the bright fluorescent lighting with no fright inducing menace, and that’s on the incredibly rare occasion that we even see them on the attack. The film lacks the very thing it purports itself to be, and that is its greatest downfall. In a world where Nicolas Cage has already endured a night of mayhem at the hands of killer animatronics inside a haunted children’s pizzeria (Willy’s Wonderland), the stakes have to be raised.

In Conclusion

Though the film seems to have struck a cord with its large base of devoted fans, newcomers will likely find themselves bored and rolling their eyes as the mishandled script falls apart around them. There are no scares — but even worse — there’s no fun. Five Nights at Freddy’s is as predictable as it is disappointing.

4/10

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