Five Nights at Freddy's - Film Review

I'll never forget when one of my friends pushed Willy's Wonderland on me that I was hesitant to give that ill-fated movie a try as I believed that it was essentially just a cheap knock-off of what this would become. As someone with a super-charged ego, I must formally put into writing that I was wrong to expect so much and now look back on Nicolas Cage's thrashing of ghoulish puppets with what one might almost classify as nostalgia. To be clear: that movie wasn't all that good, which says something when I look at what this film managed to pull off.

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Where You Can Find It: I saw this in theaters, where it's currently available. It is also available for streaming on Peacock.

General Information 
Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror film that was released on 27 October 2023. It was directed and co-written by Emma Tammi. The film is based on the popular horror video game franchise of the same name, which was created by Scott Cawthon, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Seth Cuddeback. Lyn Moncrief handled cinematography for this film, and scoring was provided by the Newton Brothers. Animatronics and some special effects were provided by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The film was produced by Blumhouse Productions and ScottGames and distributed under Universal Pictures. As of 2 November 2023, Five Nights at Freddy's has raked in roughly $150 million at the global box office against a reported production budget of $20 million. Per Josh Weiss at NBC, the film's success has broken several records with the film having the highest grossing opening week of a horror film since The Mummy Returns in 2001. According to the founder and CEO of Blumhouse, Jason Blum: Five Nights at Freddy's is the "Biggest Blumhouse opening movie of all-time." Reviews-wise, the record-breaker has not fared as well. It has a nail-biting 33 Metascore on Metacritic and an even worse 29% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite this, rumors of the film getting a sequel are already swirling and are all but confirmed.

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The Story
Troubled security guard, Mike (played by Josh Hutcherson), is struggling to hold down a job and keep his life together when he's fired from his latest position at the local mall. He's desperately trying to raise his much-younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), while also juggling the mortgage and custody battles with his vindictive Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson). It's at his lowest moment of need that his creepy career advisor (Matthew Lillard) offers him one last opportunity as a night watchman at an abandoned pizzeria. With no other opportunities, Mike takes the job but soon realizes there's something sinister afoot with the leftover animatronic mascots of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.

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Mike better keep an eye on those monitors. This is no simple security gig.

I never played the video games this movie is based off of, but I've always been a fan of horror games and I generally found it fun to watch others play it as there are certainly scary aspects of the franchise as a whole. Going into the labyrinthine lore of this series will shake out all sorts of creepiness like ghosts, child killers, and possessed animatronics. I went into this movie very curious as to how Emma Tammi would craft a film around a game that involves a solitary security guard who is stuck in one room watching camera monitors.

The answer the writers provided to my lingering question was unfortunately lack-luster. First and foremost, the film abandons the game's sense of claustrophobia and isolation by frequently having other people hang out with Mike while he's at work. Worst of all, the animatronics are exceptionally non-frightening in both execution and presentation. They're certainly capable of murder, but they only do so at the whim of the plot. In comparison to Willy's Wonderland, its puppet monsters actively attempted to kill anyone and everyone that had the misfortune of spending a night at that restaurant. Throughout this film, the writers exaggeratedly telegraphed exactly which characters would die and which would be safe at all times, which killed any suspense I had as its runtime plodded along.

Speaking of runtime, Five Nights at Freddy's felt way too long, which is frankly surprising given its generally reserved hour and fifty minutes length. I blame a lot of this on the needless side-plots of Mike's repetitive dream sequences and most scenes involving Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). The pacing is a bit off too as the nature of the pizzeria is sort of just dumped on the laps of the viewers in the second act via exposition where it then proceeds to crawl to the ending credits.

Special Effects/Atmosphere

Since the early years of The Muppets and Sesame Street, I've always really appreciated the practical effects Jim Henson's Creature Shop brings to the silver screen. I was especially impressed with their work in Farscape and Labyrinth and there was a lot of fanfare over their involvement in this film with bringing Freddy and his pals to life. Unfortunately, I wasn't all that happy with how the animatronics worked. It's great that they look identical to the robots in the game, but their movements are incredibly slow and it was very noticeable that crafty editing was needed whenever any of the animatronics would do something. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that it makes them less frightening, but they are cool to look at. I sincerely hope that we see some upgrades in the sequel that have a bit more juice in them.

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The animatronics look great, but they're poorly utilized and a bit slow...

I will also say that I think Freddy Fazbear's Pizza looks great. The rooms, monitors, and decor all perfectly align with the game and give off that eerie vibe that something terrible happened at this pizzeria long ago. The opening credits deserves a pretty big shout-out too as I think it was done incredibly well, and I particularly enjoyed the Newton Brothers' scoring. There was even some licensed music in the second and third act that I thought was incredibly appropriate for the setting and made me chuckle a bit.

 

A final thing I want to touch on is Tammi's choice to make this film PG-13. I've been to several other Blumhouse movies that were of the same rating, but this is arguably the first theatrical Blumhouse release I've been to that had so many children and young adults at it. In that regard, I think Tammi does a serviceable job of providing a sort of "gateway drug" to younger audiences that aren't all that familiar with the horror genre. I'd wager that (with adult supervision) even the 7-12 age range of children can see this movie with very few problems as there's almost no blood or gore whatsoever.

The Acting 

I've seen Josh Hutcherson in some of his previous work and have never found him to stand out all that much. He's fairly forgettable in this too, although I can see that he makes some effort to deliver some emotional range. There's some very strange chemistry in this film regarding the interplay of many of its actors that probably hurts the overall story even more-so, and he is at the center of this issue. I never bought Mike was Abby's big brother as the age difference is incredibly vast, and I'm quite curious as to why they didn't simply write Mike as a single dad. The chemistry between Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail also lands with a thud as the two seem to deliver their lines at each other as opposed to acting like regular human beings.

One of the big selling points of this film was the inclusion of Matthew Lillard, who I'm a huge fan of. Since his days in Scream and Scooby-Doo, I've always admired Lillard's enthusiasm and the level of passion he brings to every project. He doesn't fail to disappoint here, although I'm sad we didn't get to see more of him. Lillard's Steve Raglan is incredibly creepy and yanks the viewer's attention to him in the handful of scenes he's in. I hope that this movie's success further bolsters his bona fides as an awesome actor, as I'd love to see him in more stuff.

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Lillard rocks in this, but he's barely in it

The Best of the Best: A near-perfect recreation of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.

The Worst of the Worst: The repetitive dream side-plot.

Calhooey Score: 4/10 - Below Average

Would I Recommend?

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Time to trim some fat

Five Nights at Freddy's may be a decent entryway for children to experience horror, but hamfisted writing and dull acting hold it back from emulating what made the franchise famous in the first place. Whereas the games had tension and mystery, the film is bloated with side-plots and exposition. If you're a parent that wants to ease a kid into horror, this will fit that Goosebumps mold, but I would just suggest watching that instead of this. I'd recommend this for family viewing at home during the Halloween season, but I don't think it's worth the trip to the theater, nor would it be worth a second viewing.

Spoiler Comments

• The opening set with the security guard was probably the best part of the entire movie. I'd rather just watch that part on YouTube and give up on the rest of it.
  
• I feel like I need to mention the opening credits again as I just loved how it infers what happened to the children at the pizzeria while using that old-school 8-bit graphics that we saw in some of the games.
• Josh Hutcherson was 31 when this film came out and Piper Rubio was 8. Even if the writers argue that Mike is in his twenties, this age gap is massive. I wonder if this was in Hutcherson's contract that he just refused to play a single dad. You're telling me that Mike's mom had a kid nearly twenty years after her second child was abducted?
• Also, didn't we hear that Mike's dad died a while before his mom did (who also died around 3-5 years before this movie was set, I think)?
• Let's talk about Aunt Jane's plan for a moment. If she wanted to take Abby to get free money from the state, it feels like this would be somewhat self-defeating considering she probably had to shell out some serious change for a lawyer.
• I'd also like to know why she felt the need to bring her lawyer to a diner to conspire with hooligans to trash a pizzeria.
• That lawyer may have looked foolish (and probably was), but he's the only one that seemingly survived that black mass unscathed. Good for him.
• Does Vanessa befriend every ill-fated security guard her dad sets up to have murdered or is Mike special for some reason? In the beginning, she doesn't even know that Mike has a child to take care of, so I'm not sure why she'd feel endeared to help him. The dude sleeps at work and has the charisma of a wet log. What does he have that the last guard didn't?
  
• The chair/table fort part was when I gave up on this film.
• Does Raglan just kill security guards now? Isn't he a child-killer? Did he change fetishes?
  
• Springtrap looked pretty cool, I'm not going to lie.
  

References

(1) Five Nights at Freddy's. (2023). Five Nights at Freddy's cover image. IMDB. Retrieved from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4589218/.

(2) Blum, Jason. (2023, October 29). Twitter post image. Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/jason_blum/status/1718651170150097280.

(3) Colangelo, BJ. (2023, September 11). Mike at security monitors image. SlashFilm. Retrieved from: https://www.slashfilm.com/1389253/five-nights-at-freddys-movie-runtime-not-three-hours/.

(4) rzephyr. (2023, June 28). Animatronics gif. Tenor. Retrieved from: https://tenor.com/view/five-nights-at-freddys-fnaf-josh-hutcherson-matthew-lillard-elizabeth-lail-gif-9381114341827192823.

(5) Weiss, J. (2023, September 7). Steve Raglan image. NBC. Retrieved from: https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/who-does-matthew-lillard-play-in-the-five-nights-at-freddys-movie.

(6) Denni. (2023, October 27). Springtrap image. Hocmarketing. Retrieved from: https://en.hocmarketing.org/frighteningly-fun-a-review-of-five-nights-at-freddys-70789.