'Five Nights at Freddy's' wastes one good idea
HANDOUT
Please choose what appeals to you the least:
PG-13-rated horror movies largely built on slashes, sound effects, and screaming
Big-screen adaptations of video games
Anything that semi-accurately could be described as “‘Saw’ for kids”
All of the above, clearly. “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” apparently based on a popular video game, is not, as you might have thought if only glancing at the image above, a shrewd identification of the odd creepiness that can exist in the relics of our youth, sometimes only to be discovered as adults. Nostalgia-seeking horror fans surely would go for a return to the days of Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza that mixes the warmth of family friendly entertainment with the mechanical weirdness of technology that turns animals into creaky animatronics. That perception might be what gets you in the door; what will slam it in your face is that “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is actually a deeply unpleasant and quite ridiculous game of hopscotch among devastating kidnapping thriller, nasty family drama, and empty serial killer nonsense.
Fired from his mall security job after tackling a dad he thinks is a kidnapper, Mike (Josh Hutcherson) takes a night gig watching over Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place, a long-shuttered establishment that for dubious reasons still needs supervision. The desperate guy will do anything to prevent his comically heinous Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) from stealing custody of his sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and apparently that means “spend extended time among haunted creatures in a small town’s creepiest place while sleep-listening to recordings of nature.” Still blaming himself for the abduction of his brother Garrett years ago, Mike’s trying to spark a memory that will lead him to answers or some kind of relief, a concept that quickly gets drowned out amidst a lot of metallic clanging and a narrative that smashes together one incongruous piece after another. That includes Elizabeth Lail (“You”) as a very unconvincing police officer and several child actors credited as characters primarily identified as “Ghost Kid.”
Perhaps fans of the video game will understand all of these decisions and plotlines, and director Emma Tammi does an admirable job with making the robot attacks look unsettlingly real. But “Five Nights at Freddy’s” has no credible performances or decent scares or details that would make you curious about playing the video game. All it has is the built-in chance that you might want to recreate the sense memory of mediocre pizza, dirty carpeting and the ding-ding of arcade games and rolling clunk of Skee-Ball machines. Yep, still got it.
D+
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