Five Nights at Freddy’s review

Short of making it a completely unnecessary gore-fest, it’s hard to say exactly what’s missing with Five Night’s at Freddy’s. The base concept of sinister animatronics killing unsuspecting intruders at an abandoned children’s amusement restaurant seems solid.

There’s an inherent creepiness to those oversized friendly-presenting animals with a darker side teasing out with just a slight narrowing of the eyelids.

When director/screenwriter Emma Tammi (The Wind) leans into the core premise, the film finds that solid unnerving edge. It’s just far too infrequent.

Ironically that’s because Tammi and co-screenwriters Scott Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback are invested in telling a story to accompany the bloody violence. That’s admirable in a lot of cases, but not always necessary with a horror/thriller especially when the storytelling isn’t all that engaging.

Mike (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games) is having a rough go of it lately moving from one dead end job to another. He needs to get it together as Mike is responsible for his little sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). Abby is on the autism spectrum and spends most of her time drawing. While he’s got Abby to take care of, Mike is still tortured by a defining moment of his childhood where his young brother was kidnapped.

The loss broke his family eventually resulting in Mike watching after Abby. With available job offers running slim, Mike visits career counselor, Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), who pitches working at the decrepit Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.

Hutcherson is a likable lead, who tends to get cast as the brooding, emotionally scarred protagonist. The story needed a little jolt of excitement and maybe going with the quiet, moody lead wasn’t the right decision. Hutcherson brings the required dramatic touch for the flashback sequences with his brother being abducted though Mike really needed to be a touch more charismatic/adventurous.

In a subplot that’s more distracting than necessary, Mike’s Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants custody of Abby to get money from the state. This doesn’t make much sense as later on; Jane hires some goons to vandalize Freddy’s.

Mike does make a friend in the kind police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, You). Vanessa has a deep knowledge of Freddy’s and the lore back when it was a popular attraction.

Something funny is going at Freddy’s and Mike is slowly realizing his dreams are more vivid with details he didn’t remember until he crashes. Granted, that probably won’t look great on his evaluation, but it’s not like anyone is going to report him.

While Mike knows something’s off it isn’t until Abby joins him for a shift that the secret of Freddy’s is revealed — the animatronic animals are alive. Tammi milks this tension and uncertainty very well. Were the bear’s eyes just closing in that manner because of the mechanics or was there more behind that emotionless stare?

The movement of the animals is appropriately creepy as well as they have a stilted and deliberate physicality. One of the problems with the film is the lack of potential fodder.

Would the film have benefitted with some of Mike’s friends deciding to crash his job and getting into deeper trouble than they could have imagined? Stock teen/young adult characters always play well in horror films as they just need some shorthand development to convey their personalities.

It seems a waste of Tammi’s efforts to fully mine the thriller aspects with menacing camera angles to pay them off so sparingly. To stick with a PG-13 rating, the bloodshed is kept to a minimum. That approach works in this case as it allows the viewers to let their imaginations wander about a character’s fate.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is a decent enough thriller that needed just a bit more punch and thrills to make for an easy recommendation. The slow pacing initially works to set up the premise but overstays it welcome when the stakes need to be higher. And dangerous.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

Watch Five Nights at Freddy’s now on Amazon Prime.