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