Movie Review: ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ is a Tepid, Tame Horror Comedy

Rating: 60/100. There was a time when the phrase “based on a video game” was a sure sign that a movie would be terrible. Between the ridiculous Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Super Mario Brothers movies of the ‘90s, there were virtually no good movies based on video games before the past few years. Now the new Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic the Hedgehog have given the children’s video game movie new life; HBO has had massive critical success with its video game-based series The Last of Us, and some movies like Werewolves Within have become surprisingly better than expected.

But, can every video game property be adapted successfully? Universal Pictures, Peacock, and director Emma Tammi are banking on the bizarre Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise being the next successful video game adaptation. But does the concept translate?

The horror comedy follows Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a young man who is raising his baby sister Abby (Piper Rubio). Mike struggles to hold down a job as he’s haunted by his PTSD over the abduction of his brother, Garrett (Lucas Grant), when he was young. He’s convinced that somewhere, lost in his memories, is the answer to the mystery of who kidnapped his brother, so he spends every night in a deep sleep trying to relive the memory to find new details. His obsession, however, has made him nearly unemployable, and he and Abby’s Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) is trying to use trying to use that to wrestle custody of Abby—and the government support checks that come with that custody—away from Mike.

Desperate, Mike takes a job as a security guard for an abandoned children’s pizzeria and arcade from the ‘80s called Freddy Fazbear’s which the owner is apparently too nostalgic about to tear down. However, Mike soon finds that the animatronic creatures are haunted by the ghosts of some children who were abducted at Freddy’s in the ‘80s. When it becomes clear that there’s a connection between Garrett’s disappearance and the abduction of these children, Mike starts pleading with the ghosts to help him find the man who took his brother, but the price that the ghosts ask of him is far too high for him to pay.

The fatal flaw at the heart of this movie is that it’s a concept that calls for a good deal of blood and guts, but that would have given the movie an R rating, which would have cut the film off from a good portion of its target audience. And so, the film is forced to pull its punches to achieve a PG-13 rating. Even if you weren’t aware of the fact that it was PG-13, it becomes apparent, as the camera pulls away during the gory moment of the opening kill scene, that this is a movie that’s never going to get as brutal as it really needs to to tell this particular story.

The script finds some really interesting ways to make the kills more psychologically disturbing than they are visually violent, but it still could have benefitted from the added gore. I realize that I’m normally the one advocating for horror movies to show more restraint as opposed to splatter-fests like Saw, but to really achieve the scariness that this movie wants, you need to know that it’s capable of going to that really gory and violent place, and it’s clear from the get-go that it isn’t.

The film does have a good, creepy vibe to it. That pretty much hinges on the simple fact that Chuck E. Cheese—the franchise that Freddy Fazbear’s is clearly based on—is inherently creepy. But it never rises from the level of “creepy” to full on “scary.” In fact, in the theater I was in, many of the kill scenes and the other moments that were clearly meant to be horrific were greeted by the audience with laughter rather than screams or gasps. I said in my review of Totally Killer that the mark of a truly great genre parody is whether or not it would still be a good example of that genre if the jokes were removed. Five Nights at Freddy’s fails that litmus test, as it doesn’t really pull off the scares it needs to be an effective horror comedy.

The movie’s ending clearly hints towards a future sequel, with one character’s fate even left ambiguous at the end of the film, giving us a bit of a cliffhanger to be resolved later in the franchise. There’s also talk that at least one actor signed on to multiple movies. But considering how tame and tepid the movie is without some more serious blood and guts, it seems hard to imagine this concept being able to carry an entire movie franchise. The basic concept of Five Nights at Freddy’s managed to create one vaguely enjoyable movie, but I don’t think there’s enough material to pull off a second.

Five Nights at Freddy’s opens in theaters and starts streaming on Peacock today.

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