Five Nights at Freddy's: Long awaited video game adaptation delivers uneven and predictable results.

⭐⭐

By Rob Ryan

(Mild spoilers)

For a video game that is now nearly 10 years old, an adaptation of the horror game "Five Nights at Freddy's" (unplayed by me but I've seen the highlights on YouTube) isn't the worst idea in the world as the game's minimalism makes it instantly open for more cinematic language to be explored when adapting this for the big screen. It would give room for more creative and suspenseful set pieces involving its animatronic antagonists instead of waiting for them to appear via jump scare. This is something that the film utilizes well for the first 45 -50 minutes or so but then ultimately fizzles out into pedestrian and unsatisfying territory.

The film like its game follows a night watchman who is hired to look after the abandoned "Freddy Fazbear's Pizzara" The man in question is Mike(Josh Hutcherson) who spent most of his nights dreaming about the day his little brother was taken by a unknown assailant while on a camping trip. He believes in a theory that there are certain details in our memory that are suppressed in our dreams and if we can go back far enough we can unearth buried parts of our subconscious. He thinks he can use this method to find out who took his brother and get him back despite never actually seeing the man who did it. It's why he is at first reluctant to accept this job offered by his career councillor (Matthew Lillard) who suspiciously only offered him after learning his last name which is certainly not a red hearing that will come back later on.

But Mike is down on his luck, he lives with his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) who doesn't take notice of him, his aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants to gain custody of Abby just to nab the benefits and he is not far off on reaching foreclosure on his house. So he reluctantly accepts the offer but does not plan to do any actual security work. He brings his walkman, and sleeping pills and starts to sleep on the job but the dreams this time become a lot more vivid and unsettling as he encounters 5 different children who start to physically injure him. Could this all be connected to the sentient animatronics standing on stage? Could this also be connected to a backstory involving missing children? Could a policewoman (Elizabeth Lali) who visits him in the middle of a shift know more than she's letting on considering everything about her behaviour screams suspect? Will this lead to an underwhelming conclusion that will constantly overexplain the mystery thus deflating any horror or suspense? Yes Yes Yes and Yes.

To this movie's credit, when it is entirely set in the restaurant and when the monsters in the film are allowed to be monsters, it is where the movie is at its strongest, a highlight of the film involves burglars who are hired by the aunt to ransack and burgle the restaurant in order to get Mike on a criminal negligence charge thus increasing her chances of winning custody. The criminals soon get more than they bargained for as the animatronics wipe them out one by one in horrifically gruesome ways. Other scary highlights involve Foxy, the one-eyed fox who always likes to sing a jingle before charging for his next victim. Those scenes put me on edge and I was really enjoying it up until that point.

But as mentioned earlier the movie fails to consistently maintain that suspense due to the obvious and hamfisted way this story develops, not saying you can't have a backstory in a horror movie but when you go as far as to portray the villains as the victims and make them the borderline hero's at the end, it's hard for me to take them seriously as any real threat by that point, which would've been fine if it's the actual villain in form of a yellow bunny that is only ever seen in drawings had been 10 times as scary as first and second acts, but despite a very cool reveal appearing out of the shadows and a horrifically freaky design, when he starts talking and speaking in movie villain dialogue, all of that goodwill in that reveal evaporates.

Other problems with the film: The movie can't seem to decide if it wants to be campy or serious, it feels like there are two films competing with each other neither of them very good. If this wanted to be campy, they should've embraced more goofy and gruesome deaths involving the creatures as well as actual laugh-out-loud comedic moments that don't make you feel lost and confused about what kind of movie you are watching. Instead, we get a strange gag involving a creepy miniature doll that appears in jumps scares with its face fully in frame before cutting to the wide shot just to reveal how tiny it is as well as a scene where Freddy takes a cab ride, pulling the suspension of the car down to one side which I guess is this movie's answer to "comedic highlights". We do get a montage set to Connection by Elastica so there's that.

Five Nights at Freddy's overall isn't goofy enough to be considered campy and it is way too predictable to work as a consistently scary horror movie. It's a movie with the usual elements of modern horror movies, a protagonist who has a traumatic back story and has to learn to accept his trauma and move on, a contrived plot involving child endangerment with all the schmultz that entails, Stupid decisions that no one would make in real life and a final showdown with the villain that is as unsatisfying as it is painfully slow, as a result the movie is watchable but a middling experience at best. Occasionally fun and suspenseful but not enough to recommend a full-price cinema trip.

Five Nights at Freddy's is out in UK cinemas now