Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) Review!!

Synopsis – A troubled security guard begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. While spending his first night on the job, he realizes the night shift at Freddy’s won’t be so easy to make it through.

My Take – With video game adaptations finally having their moment, particularly with the massive successes of HBO’s The Last Of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Film (2023), it seemed like the perfect time to bring the screen adaption of an indie horror game which surprising became one of the biggest multimedia sensations of the last decade.

Created in 2014 by Scott Cawthon, the first ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ games went viral after popular YouTuber Markiplier began streaming his playthroughs, touting it as the scariest game ever made. Since then, Cawthon has produced at least one new Freddy’s game almost every year, and they’ve been widely embraced by his audience of video game streamers and their audience of video game streamer-streamers.

But coming to the adaption, while hardcore fans will be just glad to see their beloved characters recreated so faithfully in this Blumhouse production, however, in the hands of director Emma Tammi (The Wind), who co-wrote the screenplay with Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, from a story by Cawthon, Chris Lee Hill, and Tyler MacIntyre, the film is a surprisingly flat attempt to turn a hit video game into a hit feature.

Rather than lock us into a nightmarish night shift, what we end up is something that is packed with video game nods but lumbered by a generic plot that would disappoint fans and leave newcomers (like myself, who had a general idea of the lore) wondering what the fuss is all about. For a supposed horror flick, there’s very little tension here and barely a trace of the game’s simple, yet terrifying, mechanic of shutting doors or turning on lights to keep animatronics away.

Considering its run time of 109 minutes, there’s just far too much of things happening like dream sequences, exposition, buildup and far too little of what one would naturally expect from an adaption like this one. You’re left wishing that the script had leaned into the horror aspect more, instead of relying on drawing newcomers with the rather bland story we’re left with.

In comparison, Willy’s Wonderland (2021), directed by Kevin Lewis from a screenplay by G. O. Parsons, which used a similar premise, and starred an unusually silent Nicolas Cage and eight off-brand murderous animatronic characters, better capitalized on the brand’s appeal with more accomplished results.

The story follows a desperate twenty-something Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), who in order to ensure that he can continue looking after his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) reluctantly agrees to work the graveyard shift, watching over the long-shuddered ’80s eatery Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza offered by Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), a career counselor.

Still traumatized by witnessing the unsolved abduction of his younger brother as a child, Mike spends his nights trying to probe his memory of the event through lucid dreaming. Confident that he can manage the security guard gig even in his sleep, he spends his working hours whacked out on sleeping pills so he can continue his subliminal kidnapping investigation. But there’s a complication. At night, the restaurant’s creepy old huge animatronic entertainers come to life and get quite brutal.

Sadly, all of this promise quickly dissipates as the film settles into an overdone trudge of unresolved trauma and exposition dumps. Here, writer-director Emma Tammi and her co-writers here, seem frighteningly unsure of how seriously they’re supposed to take regarding the nature of the killer robots and so we’re left equally confused. Plus, they doesn’t seem to have bothered to craft a mystery at all.

The big reveal is a big inevitability and the big showdown is a big letdown, with some misjudged scenery-chewing and laughable stabs at emotion. Instead, it clangs from straight-faced speeches about childhood trauma to kids’ film-level goofiness, tonally awkward and strangely, maddeningly dull. There are plenty of twists, but they play out so straight that they yield neither surprise nor suspense. Even as someone who has no experience with the games, the whole execution felt rote.

To director Tammi’s credit, there are a few instances where she creatively works around the low rating to give the impression of hardcore violence. In a particularly impressive scene, a character gets bitten in half in silhouette, which, while completely blood-free, is still pretty gnarly. Also, there’s somehow not enough of the animatronics. Created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, they naturally look pretty cool, both faithful to the game design and like credible, physical machinery, like something you might have scarring memories of seeing in the ’80s or ’90s.

But the film doesn’t seem entirely sure of how scary it’s allowed to make them. Aside from a cold-open kill, Freddy and co are kept to the sidelines to build the relationship between Mike and Abby, with Hutcherson and Rubio creating a believable and affecting sibling bond. Add to that the writers’ makes a huge miscalculation in turning them into misunderstood monsters, with an origin story that’s technically from the games but deflating in adaptation.

Performances wise, Josh Hutcherson is a decent lead, but his performance isn’t helped by a shallow script that confuses heavy backstory for emotional depth. Piper Rubio is cute and likable. Elizabeth Lail is helplessly under-served by a thinly written character. Mary Stuart Masterson delivers a cartoonish turn. Matthew Lillard chews the scenery in his small but pivotal part, while Kat Conner Sterling is wasted. On the whole, ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ is an uninspired adaptation that fails to deliver thrills or scares.