Review: Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's is a great title for a video game. There's the concept right there: you've got to make it through five nights! Turn it into a movie title, and the threat becomes a promise: you're going to spend five whole nights at Freddys! Which means you're going to make it alive through at least the first four, and there goes any suspense for 4/5ths of the movie. Which, when it's a 110 minute movie, is a lot of run time to spend looking at some (intentionally) cheesy animatronic killbots.

It's the 1990s, and security guard Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) isn't exactly on a career upswing. Which is a problem as he's guardian to his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and even if they don't really connect personally he's still got to pay the bills. That's looking a lot more difficult after he loses his mall job for assaulting a guy he thought was kidnapping a child (does Mike have a traumatic past that will be relevant later? You bet!) and now his aunt wants custody of Abby for those sweet, sweet government benefit checks.

So Mike is in a very vulnerable position when his somewhat offputting job advisor (Matthew Lillard, always great to see) directs him to a gig spending his nights guarding a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza place. Once a thriving child-friendly franchise where anamatronic mascots performed, it's now a creepy abandoned dump. Why does it even need a security guard? Could it be that his job isn't so much to keep the local dirtbags out, as keep what lurks within... in?

No, not really. It takes Mike a fair while to figure out what's going on - the pizza mascots are possessed and murderous - so while the killbots are racking up a body count thanks to some daytime break-ins, Mike is gradually learning the lore from local cop Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail). Turns out the place closed down back in the 80s after five children were murdered there. Could there possibly be a link to Mike's own past? Will he have to bring Abby with him to work at the worst possible time? Why is all this treated so seriously? Some of these questions (not the last one) will soon be answered.

For an idea that's already been ripped off by multiple movies (the recent Banana Splits film, the "Nicolas Cage doesn't speak" horror movie Willy's Wonderland) this plays things surprisingly straight. Presumably the fans of the extremely successful video game franchise wouldn't have it any other way; for movie-goers, the lack of decent laughs in a movie that's meant to be about cutesy robots brutally murdering people is a major weakness.

What this does have going for it is cutesy robots who are also creepy, and it's not hard to see their appeal. "See" being the important word; while visually they're impressive (and impressively sinister at times), they never really develop much personality as monsters. While there's an in-story reason for that, it's also a missed opportunity to really build on what's easily the most interesting element here.

With its mix of not-scary-enough horror and too-extensive backstory (there's an entire subplot about using lucid dreaming to try and solve a crime), this ends up feeling more like franchise maintenance than entertainment. It's a film that exists to further the brand rather than be enjoyable in its own right, something aimed entirely at pre-sold audiences - whether they might be long time fans or just a group (or cinema full) of people who think the idea of killer cuddly toys is so awesome that the actual movie is an afterthought.

Going by the US box office, there's a lot of those people out there: Five Nights at Freddy's is back in business.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Expend4bles

The hook with the original Expendables was simple: all your old favourite action heroes are back! Well, not all of them, but over the next couple of movies they managed to pull pretty much everyone from the 80s and 90s back onto the big screen one last time. But even if you haven't looked at a calendar lately you'd be aware that the 80s aren't getting any closer time-wise: how do you make an action sequel starring classic action heroes when they're finally too old for this shit?

If you're Expend4bles, you just leave all the oldies out of it. The series has always thrown in a few younger stars here and there, with Jason Statham as the co-lead to bring in action fans who like their stars to still be able to kick their way out of trouble. It's been almost a decade since the last film and Statham's now the only cast member left with any kind of box office clout - even series star Sylvester Stallone has moved over to TV - and this is his film in all but name.

After a middle east massacre led by bad guy Suarto (Iko Uwais) and a totally unrelated bar fight over a ring belonging to Barney (Stallone) that couldn't possibly become relevant later, the plot kicks in. A mysterious bad guy from Barney's past (codename: Ocelot) is back, and CIA handler Marsh (Andy Garcia) wants The Expendables to investigate the carnage in Libya that presumably has been going on for days considering Suarto is still driving around shooting stuff when they finally arrive.

Lee Christmas (Statham), Gunnar (Dolph Lungren, now with longer hair that the film feels needs explaining), Toll Road (Randy Couture), and newcomers Easy Day (50 Cent) and Galan (Jacob Scipio) are the ground team, while Barney stays with the plane overhead. Where is the safest place to be when Suarto and his team start blowing even more stuff up? The answer may surprise you.

After the bungled mission - turns out Suarto escaped with a trigger that'll enable Ocelot to create an atomic bomb - Christmas is on the outs and his sex buddy Gina (Megan Fox) is the new team leader. While she's off to get the trigger back, he's stuck working as a bodyguard for an online influencer while wearing his old suit from The Transporter films.

Previous films in the series sold the idea of international mercenaries traveling the globe killing people while looking like an over-the-hill bikie gang. Much of the rest of this one takes place on an old freighter in the middle of nowhere. It makes for a decent enough action location while still giving off distinct "we ran out of money" vibes, but at least it means less need for cheap-looking CGI.

The smaller scale does have some advantages. This is basically a Jason Statham (and friends) movie (Stallone sits much of it out), which means the fights are usually decent, there's a few comedy scenes that aren't completely embarrassing, and the whole thing moves forward with the bare minimum of time wasting subplots or fan service. It's nothing special, but it's been a long time since the first Expendables was a surprise hit, and seeing this kind of basic action movie on the big screen is increasingly rare.

The problem is that The Expendables franchise was never a traditional action series. Having the oldies stagger out for one last punch-up was the whole point; with the pensioners now pensioned off, all that's left is new faces delivering the same old mindless world-saving violence. 

If they're going to make Lee Christmas the star, time to latch onto the latest action trend and just set it during Christmas with a Christmas pun for a title; paint a few hand grenades to look like Christmas baubles, wrap some tinsel around a knife, and Expendables:5lay Ride is a sure-fire hit.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Creator

Originality is an overrated virtue in movies. Big-screen storytelling is about taking us on a journey: sometimes we just want to check out the same old haunts. Despite the title, there's not a lot that feels created about The Creator. It's a mash-up collection of tropes and cliches and SF paperback cover art from a director (Gareth Edwards) best known for striking visuals and same old stories. Does that make it a bad movie? Not automatically.

In a future where very little is what it seems but all the surprises can be seen coming a mile away, Joshua (John David Washington) is a man on a mission. The development of artificial intelligence (presented via an opening retro faux-newsreel) was going fine until a nuke destroyed LA: having seen The Terminator, the US military assumed computers were making a move to wipe out humanity and decided to fight back, with Joshua at the pointy end of the spear.

While the US binned their AI (though they kept their unintelligent machines handy), New Asia became a haven for thinking software, though most of it seems to be walking around in robot bodies - there's no talking cars or smart houses. Seeing AI as a global threat, the US declared war. While they mostly fire off drone strikes from a giant suborbital platform called NOMAD, there's still room for boots on the ground - such as Joshua, who we meet on an undercover mission to ferret out the human brain behind the AI revolution.

Things go wrong, Joshua fails both at his mission and at keeping the woman he loves alive, and five years later he's a washed up drunk until the military comes calling with an offer he can't refuse. If the New Asia struggle is a Vietnam War analogue, it's Apocalypse Now time. Well, for a few minutes at least, as Joshua leads a team to a secret jungle lab where they will a): take out a ultimate AI weapon, b): kill its creator, and c): hopefully find his dead love. The twist? The ultimate weapon is (in the form of) a child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who can shut machines down with their mind.

The road trip that follows makes up in incident what it lacks in originality: there's always something happening, even if not much of it lingers. And Edwards does serve up a lot of great visuals, though they rarely generate much of a sense of the world behind them. One or two of these big background images deployed in a short film would make for powerful world-building; here they just pile up one atop the other without ever coming together to create a plausible New Asia.

That said, there are times where the haphazard approach does click. Despite being at war with the US - NOMAD is just drifting through their airspace dropping missiles, while giant US ARMY-branded tanks crush villages - New Asia doesn't seem to have any military of their own. As Joshua and Alphie flee the remains of his former team (who haven't given up on dropping Alphie into a trash compactor) and hit the road, the only obstacles are local robot cops and some Vietcong-style robot rebels, while in the cyberpunk cities life goes on. The idea that the US declared a war and the other side went "whatever" feels more futuristic than any number of hollow-headed, human-faced robots walking around.

Mash-ups can be satisfying in their own right, and eventually the emotional through-line of the story kicks in hard enough to clarify that the striking backdrops are just meant to be striking backdrops. The world of The Creator rarely feels more than 2D (the robots too often look like humans in dress up, which they are), but Washington gives a battered performance that's almost enough to make everything around him feel real through sheer gravity. 

His performance comes direct from a smaller, better film, but those big science-fiction backdrops he's standing in front of definitely have an appeal of their own.

- Anthony Morris