One day during the summer, a trailer flashed across my phone screen. I recognized the characters, and by the time Five Nights at Freddy’s in all big, bold letters appeared, I knew I had to see this movie. Not because it looked genuinely interesting and appealed to me, but because other movies like this one had crashed and failed. I had to see how bad this movie would turn out.
First things first, I am not the intended audience for this movie. The references and callbacks all flew over my head, as I have never played the games at all. However, I saw the movie with somebody who did, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
In short, FNAF has an understandable story on paper. The movie starts with the main character, Mike Schmidt, needing a job in order to keep custody of his sister, as he also struggles with reconciling with the abduction of his younger brother. Mike takes a job at an abandoned pizzeria as a security guard, meant to keep people out. However, what he doesn’t know is that the animatronics are still functioning and moving about, due to them being possessed by ghost children. A couple of intruders and strange visions of his brother and the children cause the nights to turn into desperate struggles for his life and for his sisters. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” does a good job at its purpose: making a watchable movie for people who have played the games. However, by itself, it is not nearly good enough, but it is still watchable, which counts for something.
First off, the movie did some good things. Mike is a compelling character, driven by his guilt over his brother getting kidnapped, while also motivated by his love for his sister. The visuals are eye-popping with bright neon colors and dim lights flickering in and out to accentuate the atmosphere of a dying, fading kids amusement park. The producers don’t fall into the trap of cringy horror movie jumpscares, a common cliche that only exists to farm cheap shock reactions.
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It all goes downhill from here, with a lot of cons. The predominant villains of the movie are the animatronics, with our first real scene with them being the murder of several trespassers, showing the threat of these machines. However, the next scene that features them shows a more childish, non-threatening image of these villains that we are supposed to fear. All that effort towards building up the characters is wasted in a single scene.
And, spoiler alert, the main villain reveal comes in the final scene of the movie. The issue with that is there is not enough time for the villain to reveal exactly what their motivation is, leading me to believe that the big reveal was just pandering toward people who have played the games.
There were also a large number of scenes that dragged or didn’t really do anything at all. There were at least two scenes that could have been smushed together into one, the first and second night of Mike’s new job at Freddy’s Pizzeria that did not need their separate scenes. Some scenes got their message across, such as the aforementioned scene where the animatronics build a pillow fort, drag on for too long. Overall this movie had a run time of nearly 2 hours, but it didn’t necessarily need that much time.
Despite all of the negative things I am saying, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” does a good job at its purpose: making a watchable movie for people who have played the games. However, by itself, it is not nearly good enough, but it is still watchable, which counts for something.
FINAL RATING: 6.5/10