Five Nights At Freddy's Review: A Horror-Comedy With No Laughs Or Scares

As someone who doesn't play video games, "Five Nights at Freddy's" seemed genuinely unadaptable from the outside. Wasn't this just a game where you fight animatronic toys at an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-style family diner? How is there enough in that premise to be fleshed out to a feature? What I couldn't have anticipated upon sitting down to director Emma Tammi's adaptation of the first game in the series was that this material suffers from the exact opposite problem: It is too overburdened with convoluted lore to satisfy any straightforward campy horror cravings. Blumhouse presumably hopes they have another "M3GAN" on their hands — and this notably didn't start shooting until after that film's enormous box office success back in January — but both dark laughs and demented scares are completely absent here, despite the inherent silliness of the source material.

A fellow critic who is an obsessive of this franchise did inform me after our screening that the movie deviates from established lore in ways that are likely to irritate die-hard fans, but as someone without that prior awareness, the only authoritative insight I can offer is that this is unlikely to win over any newcomers to the FNAF world.

I would normally applaud any filmmaker's decision to play such odd material completely straight, but Emma Tammi's film leans too far in that direction. It becomes increasingly tedious the more it tries to take this world seriously, not having the fun with it that it should as its balance of heart and horror ends up skewing overwhelmingly toward the former.

Set in the early 2000s — making this a Russian doll of nostalgia, as it adapts a 2010s game series and reflects on a 1980s cultural artifact through a pre-9/11 lens — Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike Schmidt, a former convict haunted by nightmares of a traumatic incident from his childhood that still send him into fits of violent rage. As a result, he loses every job he gets after just a few shifts, leaving his career counselor (Matthew Lillard) with no choice but to give him the role nobody wants: the overnight security guard at a long-closed pizza parlor, which the original owner has kept only because he couldn't bear to see it torn down. The cold open, in which the previous security guard is hunted down by Freddy Fazbear and his animatronic friends, teases what's to come Mike's way, but nothing that follows lives up to this intense promise.

Instead, "Five Nights at Freddy's" is mostly a tale about a man struggling to take care of his much younger sister (Abby, played by Piper Rubio) as he still grapples with the guilt of not being able to protect another sibling many years earlier. There are extended gaps between scenes featuring the animatronics, meaning that when they do arrive, they feel like they're from a different film altogether rather than the main attraction of this one — and even if those moments have analogs in the source material, are fans of the game really coming to this hoping the backstory is fleshed out more at the expense of the ridiculous carnage itself?

Hutcherson is a solid dramatic actor, but having not had a leading screen vehicle like this for several years, it does feel like he's trying to inject this franchise with more gravitas than necessary to cement his return as a much-missed star. It's admittedly better than approaching this as a quick paycheck vehicle, but he never finds the sweet spot between playing it straight and remembering to have fun with it. He delivers a solemn performance that would be admirable were it not at complete odds with what is required by the movie around it. In other words, he manages to do good work despite not understanding the assignment.

Someone who completely understands the assignment is his co-star Matthew Lillard, who, in what amounts to a brief extended cameo bookending the film, is the only actor that delivers the turbo-charged intensity you'd assume was needed to make the movie work. I'm not sure if a performance pitched at that level would manage to sustain audience interest or merely exhaust them, but it's suggested that he'd play a bigger role in a potential sequel, and there is at least a glimmer of hope that it could offer more in the way of madness — not just overstuffed world-building and surprisingly serious character drama.

But enough about the humans. What about the creatures of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza themselves? Created in collaboration with Jim Henson's Creature Shop, there is an attention to era-appropriate detail in the design of both the mascots and the abandoned restaurant they remain stuck in. Without sounding like I'm damning with faint praise, the production design might be the best thing the film has going for it, even if Freddy Fazbear's looks more polished than your usual rundown diner. Unfortunately, this world loses much of its mystique once we see the animatronic figures move, something which has been largely hidden from both the marketing and the first act itself, slowly teasing their movements like the shark from "Jaws."

In the cold light of day, they become CGI-laden monstrosities, no longer even resembling anything manmade due to the amount of work put in to make them appear more energetic and expressive. It's here where I once again thought of "M3GAN" and how that movie's masterstroke was making its titular doll feel like a genuine presence, even as the audience became aware a lot of its movements were a young actor in a performance capture suit. There is no similarly tactile presence in "Five Nights at Freddy's" — in fact, audiences unaware of the Jim Henson connection might assume the cast was all reacting to objects that would be added in entirely during post-production. Hell, even the balance of heightened horror-comedy and grief-stricken family drama feels like a markedly inferior attempt to follow in that film's footsteps, but "Five Nights at Freddy's" stumbles because it can't get the balance right. The jokes fall flat, the scares are nonexistent, and there's so much focus on the protagonist's comparatively sincere journey that it feels actively cheapened by the genre elements rather than complementing them.

Again, I have no idea whether the franchise's die-hard fans will respond positively to the movie — all I know is this introduction to the world of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza was enough to make me never want to spend another night there.

"Five Nights at Freddy's" hits theaters on October 27.