Too Many Nights at Freddy’s

Five Nights at Freddy’s the intellectual property exists as an empire. The first video game, released almost a decade ago, was so good that it spawned the type of young fanbase one sees nowadays from massive titles like Fortnite and Roblox.

It’s more than games, of which there are now nine (!). There are novels. There’s mountains of merchandise. All of this in service of The Lore™. Keep this in mind as I chronicle the many failings of the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s, and by extension probably society as a whole. God help us.

Mike, played by Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games), has it rough. He’s the sole guardian of his neurodivergent little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) after their parents died. Mike also had his little brother kidnapped when he was only 12. On top of that he can’t keep a job and he’s obsessed with the idea that he might be able to track down his brother’s kidnapper through intentional, lucid dreaming. Like already this is too much for a fucking movie about pizza robot bears or whatever.

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Emma Tammi
Written by: Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback, and Emma Tammi
Starring:Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio, Elizabeth Lail, and Matthew Lillard
Running time: 110 mins

Mike’s aunt has evil designs on stealing away custody of Abby so she can collect a check, which means Mike needs to prove he can stay gainfully employed. Excuse me, what is even happening? In desperation, Mike meets with a career advisor named Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), who’s very obviously up to something with his advising of Mike. Also, no one wastes the many talents of Matthew Lillard on a tiny role like career advisor, so you will not be forgiven if you don’t see his character’s twist coming from hundreds of miles away.

Raglan offers Mike an opportunity no one wants, which he turns down at first, wasting our time for another thirty minutes of this ridiculously long two-hour runtime, when we all know he’s eventually going to end up in the damn rat pizza child casino.

Mike eventually ends up working the graveyard shift in the derelict Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza—an intentional reference to the Showbiz Pizzas and Chuck E. Cheese’s of the real world. Almost immediately Mike’s greeted by a not-at-all suspicious police officer named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) who comes knocking at the restaurant and seems to know an awful lot about it, and the children who went missing there, and the dangerous, hulking animatronic monsters, and where they even keep the tablecloths. Nope, not sus at all.

The film spends the rest of its runtime juggling Mike’s desire to interrogate ghost children in his dreams (?) with saving Abby from ghost children-possessed animatronic animal musicians. Read that last sentence again and tell me it doesn’t make you want to throw an Xbox in the ocean.

The problems with FNAF are as numerous as the IP is ubiquitous. It’s overly long, far from scary, and tonally amorphous. Most egregious of all, it feels rote and predictable. I say this as someone who has never played the games. (They’re on my list, I swear!)

FNAF plays the lore game more than it plays the horror game, and the sad thing is that might be good though to endear a film like this to its target audience. Or should I say userbase? The type of entertainment value a film like this possesses is purely that of recognition. It’s a nesting Easter egg before it’s a film. It’s something to point at and say, “I recognize that.” The atmosphere is non-existent. The scares are cheap. But there’s that bear. I know that bear.

This is all bad enough, but consider this franchise was also beaten to the animatronic horror film punch two years ago. Redeeming qualities of FNAF? I guess the animatronic characters are mostly well rendered except for Cupcake who might as well be spliced in from some other smoothed over 3D-animated film. Rubio also makes the most of the script’s attempts at making Abby charmingly precocious.

For some, especially die-hard fans, Five Nights At Freddy’s will be sufficient. For the rest of us, we should stick to the games.