I am no fan of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games. In fact, I find the games boring and never really understood how they got so popular—but, I am getting old and grouchy, so it may just be my own taste. I’ve still watched some of my favorite YouTubers play through the various games, including the numerous spinoffs and fan games, just to see if anything changed or if they got scared in the process. However, I wouldn’t say I’ve absorbed much, if any, of the lore that is apparently embedded in the franchise, so I cannot claim the accuracy of the movie’s interpretation of the source material. Thus, if you are a Five Nights at Freddy’s fan, be aware that my bias is not necessarily in your favor and that I cannot accurately say whether or not the movie does a good job of translating the source material.

Pros

Animatronics, costumes, and practical effects are good
Decent music score

Cons

Plot is very convoluted and arbitrary
Acting is unconvincing by most of the cast
Not much screen time with the animatronics
A very PG-13 movie
Does not need to be as long as it is

Plot & Thoughts

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is having trouble keeping a job to help pay his rent and take care of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio). He’s haunted by a traumatic memory in which his younger brother was kidnapped while the family was on vacation. It tore his family apart and now he’s on his own. So, rather than try to get over this whole thing that happened 20 years ago and be a good brother to the member of his family who is still alive, he goes to sleep with a specific audio tape playing every night so he can dream about the traumatic event and hopefully remember enough details in his dreams to find out who the kidnapper is. Sound stupid? That’s only because it is.

Complicating matters is the fact that his aunt, Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), is trying to get custody of Abby because she wants a monthly government check for child care—this doesn’t sound like a very lucrative scam to me, but that’s the justification the movie gives. Desperate for work, even if it cuts into his precious dream time, he agrees to a night-time security guard job at the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s pizzeria that his career counselor, Steve (Matthew Lillard), offers him. As is the case in the video games, the pizzeria has animatronics similar to Chuck E Cheese that happen to come to life and kill people.

This is not a good movie and I’m not really surprised. For one thing, a bad movie is practically the status quo these days. More importantly, however, it would be easy to get bogged down trying to include as much backstory from the games as possible, which this movie seems to do. The lore also happens to be somewhat cryptic and open to interpretation from what I understand in the minimal research I’ve done for this review. So, much of it could have gotten lost in the script. What ends up on the screen is a lot of time focusing on Mike and his issues and not much time with the iconic killer robots. The robots look good and accurate, but I doubt that’s enough to satisfy fans.

The plot that centers around Mike and Abby is just dumb and uninteresting. I’m not sure who came up with the whole thing about trying to solve a mystery with his dreams and why that should be the focus of the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, but that was a first-draft idea that should have been scrapped. You could still have him struggling with his trauma and his ability to keep a job as part of his character arc, but the focus should have been more on his time at the abandoned restaurant and dealing with the murderous robots. Hell, if I was writing the script, I would have simplified matters. Eliminate the whole aunt subplot. Instead, say that he needs to keep a job longer than a few weeks or the state is going to take Abby away to make him motivated enough to keep working at a haunted restaurant that is potentially trying to kill him. I’d make the first few nights seem like he’s going a little crazy from the stress, unsure if the robots are alive and moving. I’d make the next few nights about him discovering the horrible past of the place, rather than getting the backstory from a side character who acts as the film’s exposition dump truck—that’s what the cop, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), does. In the last act of the film, I’d have him trying to come up with ways to survive the night or break the curse. It’s simple and I think it could have been done in 90 minutes instead of the 109 this one uses.

TL;DR

Five Nights at Freddy’s adds a lot of needless fluff and character backstory to a plot that really could have been much simpler. It seems like with certain lines from characters, plot twists, and story arcs, the filmmakers were more focused on making fan service from all the games, rather than focusing on a story and building it out from there. Even with the fan service, I doubt fans of the franchise will like this adaptation. You’d be better off watching Willie’s Wonderland.

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