The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
I’ve never played a Five Nights at Freddy’s game, but, based on what I thought I knew about the games, I was looking forward to this movie. I thought that the gist of the games was that people were stuck in a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff and the animatronics came to life and started killing people. That’s a great idea. It’s the kind of idea that you kick yourself for not thinking of it first. However, it turns out that that is only kinda, sorta what Five Nights at Freddy’s is about and the resulting movie is a tame, lame ghost story that would barely pass muster as a PBS Halloween special.
Our lead is Mike Schmidt (played by Josh Hutcherson), who is fired from his gig at a mall for mistaking a father for a kidnapper in the movie’s only funny scene. His career counselor (played by Matthew Lillard) offers him a job as a night watchman at an abandoned restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, our stand-in for Chuck E. Cheese, and he accepts the job because he needs to support his kid sister Abby. On the second night of work, Mike is visited by a cop named Vanessa, who seemingly has nothing to do but patrol an abandoned restaurant that contains nothing of value, and she informs him that Freddy’s was closed down in the 80s after five children were murdered there and the bodies were never found. Amazingly, despite the fact that Mike had a little brother that was abducted in the 80s, he wasn’t aware of any of this. Also how did they know that the murders took place at Freddy’s if the bodies and the killer were never found? Anyway, spooky shenanigans ensue. Very, very mild spooky shenanigans.
Before I get into spoilers, and I need to get into spoilers on this one, the broad issue is that Five Nights at Freddy’s is a mind-numbingly boring film. I would say it wouldn’t frighten a toddler, but it did seem to terrify the teenaged boys in the audience, who would scream like little girls even when absolutely nothing was happening (which was the vast majority of the running time). If you were expecting animatronic animals killing people, then you are going to be pretty goddamn disappointed because this is actually a ghost story in the vein of one of the lamer ghost episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? There is one sequence in the film that resembled my expectations of animatronics on a killing spree, and even that is a completely bloodless, anticlimactic affair because of the PG-13 rating (hey, we needed those chickenshit teenaged boys to be able to buy tickets). I can honestly say that this is one of the most boring theater experiences that I’ve had in recent memory and one of my friends actually fell asleep.
Now to get into SPOILERS….this movie doesn’t make a lick of sense. It turns out that the career counselor (Matthew Lillard’s character) is actually William Afton, the serial killer responsible for the murdered children in the 80s. He killed the kids, put their souls into the animatronics (how? I don’t know) and now they do his evil bidding (why? I don’t know). He sends Mike to guard the restaurant (which I guess he owns?) because he wants to kill his little sister. Why does he need to go through this whole charade to kill the sister? I don’t know. The cop, Vanessa, is actually his daughter and he sends her there to….I don’t know what she’s doing there. Most importantly, Afton successfully disappeared after the murders in the 80s by changing his name, but staying in the same fucking town and becoming a career counselor? Not once has anyone noticed that he’s the same frigging guy? Maybe these things are explained in the games, but they sure as hell don’t make any sense here. END SPOILERS.
The one positive here is that its good to see Matthew Lillard again and he seems to be having a great time here, but that’s not nearly enough to sustain interest for anybody above the age of fourteen. Much like Megan, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a horror movie only for children. And look, I know the counterargument. I’m a 39 year-old man that hasn’t played the games and this isn’t for me. And sure, it seemed like the target audience in my theater was having a good time. If that’s you, then, by all means, enjoy the movie. You’re all pussies, but enjoy what you want.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy’s_(film)#/media/File:Five_Nights_At_Freddy’s_poster.jpeg
