Five Nights at Freddy’s (the video game franchise, not the movie) has some of the darkest lore in gaming; this is a reputation it’s upheld since the first game was released nine years ago. The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie acknowledges this while watering it down to the point of insult, creating a bland PG-13 horror comedy with one-note characters, lackluster plotlines, and cringeworthy dialogue.
For the unenlightened, the FNAF franchise’s main story revolves around Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, a defunct restaurant populated by retired animatronics. It operates as a sort of parody of Chuck E. Cheese’s, except for one thing: the animatronics are possessed by the ghosts of five murdered children. Our main character, Mike Schmidt, starts at Freddy’s as a night security guard and struggles to survive his shifts as the gang of evil robots tries to kill him.
In the movie, Schmidt routinely falls asleep on the job, coming back to a recurring nightmare about his brother, who was kidnapped when they were children. This would have been a fantastic addition to the story, except it’s the only thing Schmidt talks about throughout the entire movie. It’s his only character trait, making him an incredibly bland protagonist that wasn’t really fun to watch. He also has custody of his little sister, Abby, who for whatever reason has a psychic connection to Fazbear’s Pizza that goes unexplained throughout the movie. This opens the story up to a major side plot: his deadbeat aunt, a cartoonishly evil figure whose evil scheme to basically kill Mike and get custody of Abby is shoehorned into the first act before being unceremoniously discarded in favor of some cheap scares.
The film also introduces Vanessa, a police officer whose only purpose is to dispense exposition to the audience about the pizzeria’s dark history and occasionally threaten Mike. She seems to witch personalities every thirty seconds to suit the plot, being either the mysterious outsider, the fun companion, or the Five Nights Wikipedia page.
Freddy and the gang – the animatronics themselves – look remarkably new and pristine despite the fact that the pizzeria is in disrepair and (according to the characters) has been left to rot for over a decade. They don’t look scary whatsoever, so the scenes in which they’re supposed to be only come across as goofy and childish. The PG-13 rating doesn’t help this, either.
FNAF suffers through its runtime from tonal whiplash – barely twenty minutes after several characters get brutally murdered one by one, there’s a happy little montage of the animatronics building a pillow fort, before going straight back to exposition about serial killers and the like. The final scenes of the movie are a melodramatic mess with an almost vaudevillian twist antagonist, a deus ex machina victory, and poorly executed action sequences. Overall, the movie came across as hastily put together as a lazy cash-grab, capitalizing on the already-establish franchise while simultaneously paying it almost no respect.
Score: 3/10
