Five Nights At Freddy’s was a sleeper hit that turned into a massive franchise that children have been addicted to. Between numerous games, toys, books, shirts, and more the series seemed like an easy win for a film adaptation. After quite some time though its clear that something just got horribly lost in translation here.
Not knowing anything about the gaming story and deep lore that is supposedly in the series my knowledge going into this was slim. I knew you watched security footage and saw animatronic robots creep around. Here though we follow security guard Mike Schmidt who after mistakenly beating a customer at his mall security job is fired and takes the night shift at the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Mike has trauma from seeing his younger brother get abducted as a child and in his current life is on the verge of losing his younger sister to his cartoonishly villain aunt. To make Mikes life harder he also has constant recurring nightmares about the situation he was in seeing his brother be abducted. This is quite a lot of plot points for a movie that is aimed at kids from a game with a simple plot.
Sadly though all these sub plots and characters such as a female cop (whose only around really to push the plot along) take us away from any spooky moments into Freddy’s. At the faintest sight of watching security cameras in the creepy old building we are taken back out to a number of generic locations.
The animatronics though, done by Jim Hensons Creature Shop, look fantastic. Like something straight out of the 80s and 90s they are just bulky fuzzy looking robots with great detail. We get though almost too much of them yet not enough. They are so fully animated here with their robotic stomping around and a subplot that makes them not scary anymore that it ruins them. Thats the other issue here though, with a PG13 rating and the franchise being aimed at younger kids / teens the film almost doesn’t know how to handle itself. We aren’t really given jump scares or on screen scares instead just being treated to almost glimpses of what could have been.
With an uninteresting story that just drags through this I can’t see kids really enjoying it. Even with the always lovable Matthew Lillard, not even he can save the performances here. For the tiny glimpses we see that this film does right we are instead just given too much story that isn’t needed and not enough simple scares or even just general creepiness.
Score : 2 / 5
