The Blumhouse adaptation of this 2010’s horror mainstay offers plenty of references & fanfare, but that’s all the movie can offer.

(SPOILERS BELOW)

The Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise is a modern story of rags to riches. From the last hurrah of veteran developer Scott Cawthon looking to strike it big, to Scott himself being worth over $70 million, this cryptic but addictive horror franchise has stuck out amongst the 2010’s for its simple gameplay and its story that’s anything but. So fresh off this success, movie plans were already underway in early 2015 with Warner Bros. originally developing a one off project before plans fell through. The project sat in limbo until being picked up for a trilogy by Jason Blum & Blumhouse. So after almost a decade in the oven, I find it baffling that the product we still got was underdeveloped and a bit stale.

A Slaughtered Script

What am I talking about? Well the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie doesn’t really feel like Five Nights at Freddy’s. It feels like someone at Blumhouse had a generic horror script lying around and they sprinkled in elements of the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise in so that it’d correlate better. With a franchise like Five Nights at Freddy’s, you don’t want to play all your cards when you have two more movies to plan out, and that’s something that Blumhouse and Scott Cawthon (now an Executive Producer for the project) realized. Also the games themselves don’t really give a lot to fill up a two hour movie. Even if they did, we’d probably be treated to two hours of audio files & a security guard stuck in his office. I find this funny on two levels, since A: the movie itself gives about 40% of its runtime to focusing on the animatronics & the pizzeria, and B: the movie is almost 2 hours long. So the final result is a film that feels like a family drama about a psychic child (because what horror movie doesn’t have one of those) with the whole Five Nights at Freddy’s element being an afterthought. The script is its own separate beast, a hybrid that has no correlation to the games, but stuff from the games will happen in this movie, mostly without reason, and the characters will move on. Like the main antagonist shows up with no lead up then just “dies”. Or how the movie is called “Five Nights at Freddy’s” yet they spend about four days there. I’m even having a hard time remembering since the plot was just so forgettable.

Hell, I’d even say that this movie fails at being a horror movie. Considering that this is a franchise born from jump scares, we maybe get about one (maybe two) effective scares in the film, with the rest being Scooby Doo levels of scary. I watched this movie with friends on Halloween, and a lot of them lost interest like 20 minutes in since the namesake (Five Nights at Freddy’s) didn’t get fully utilized until like 30 minutes in. Once you do see Freddy, Chica, Bonnie, and Foxy, it does become a treat to see these characters on screen, and they act just like their in game counterparts. Foxy runs down the hallway to gut an intruder, Chica sets her cupcake to do a lot of her heavy lifting, etc. It reminds you of the games, and of what this movie should’ve been, a movie not about a custody battle for some brat, but rather a story about a killer pizza chain and trying to survive five nights at Freddy’s Pizzeria.

As a Critic/As a Fanboy…

Visually, this movie offers a lot of pros & cons. For one, the cinematography was just okay. Nothing mesmerizing, but nothing abjectly bad. I can’t pull out a certain scene for it’s composition, or for the lighting, but it also doesn’t take away from what you’re seeing on screen. Performances were also just okay. Josh Hutcherson was decent as our lead protagonist, and I wish that we got more of Matthew Lillard in this movie because he’s mad talented. However, I do like both the character & set design in this take of Five Nights at Freddy’s. The film had a budget of about $20 million (which they made back much more than anticipated) so it’s curious to me how they were able to work in such amazing models of both the animatronics & the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria location as a whole. Freddy’s look trapped in time, a relic of an older and more blissful era covered in trash & dust. The animatronics look great with the use of colourful but dirty, like they came straight of the games themselves. The suits are also limiting & wonky in how they operate, which helps add to the feeling of these suits being actual old animatronics. God forbid if this was taken by a larger studio like WB and they used CGI, we would’ve seen an uncanny & much worse product. It’s understandable why everything else in this film looks so forgettable since they want your attention to be on these scenes, even if they aren’t as much as originally thought.

In fact, I see that the easiest way that people summarize Five Nights at Freddy’s is that “It’s a movie made for the fans”, and I can understand this. The opening credits mirror an art style found in the death cutscenes found in the first couple games of the franchise. We see countless callbacks to moments across the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise from the very first game to moments in the newest instalments. Even people associated with outside the franchise like CoryxKenshin & MatPat from Game Theory make small cameos. This movie felt like Scott Cawthon giving back to the fans that helped support him & his games, which is well natured, yet it feels like it also alienates those who know nothing about the franchise & just want to watch a movie about killer robots.

So that’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, a film backed by its respect to the franchise and the fans when it’s not telling the most generic & boring story. I don’t hate this movie, i’m more disappointed if anything, but I feel like there’s room for more to be done in this universe. Obviously a sequel is expected, and I feel like both Scott Cawthon & director Emma Tammi have the elements for a great sequel or even a prequel. There’s a lot of stories that can be told from this franchise, yet for now, this is a a slice of metaphorical pizza that’s well past its best before date.

4/10

(something, something, something, PURPLE GUY)