Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 49 minutes, Director – Emma Tammi
Plagued by past traumas, Mike (Josh Hutcherson) takes a night security job at a run-down family entertainment restaurant where there seems to be something sinister about the animatronics.
If there’s one thing that Five Nights At Freddy’s effectively demonstrates it’s how thin the line between horror and comedy is. Unfortunately, the sequences batting for PG-13 horror tension don’t manage to raise a laugh either. As the living animatronics walk in the background of shots, or the camera cuts just as they attack such moments feel as if they’re closer to something in a comedy than the aimed for horror stylings. In addition, the editing of these sequences also leads to minimal effect simply because the main focus is cut away from to maintain the PG-13 rating (although still obtaining a just about rightful 15 here in the UK), something which could likely be kept if the camera stayed on the main action.
That is, if the animatronics and their antics can be considered the main action. For much of the narrative we follow Mike (Josh Hutcherson) as he starts a new job as night security guard at a rundown family entertainment restaurant, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place. Alongside dealing with strange occurrences at his new workplace, during the day Mike battles his aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) for custody of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and experiences recurring flashbacks to his own childhood where he blames himself for the abduction of his younger brother.
The two subplots, later combined with a third, are generally uninteresting and add little to the already lax, yet somehow still crammed, story taking place over a lengthy 109 minutes. Instead of providing something more detailed, or even just leaning more into the possible spookiness, the various strands at play are bland due to how basic they feel. The five nights are cluttered with this meaning that sometimes Freddy and the other animatronic band members almost feel like an afterthought. It’s not until the second half that they properly start to do something beyond brief lurking or attacks.
“It’s been a weird night” Mike explains to a visiting police officer (Elizabeth Lail) after very little has happened. The events have been more in his mind than anything else. We’re still yet to be properly introduced to the murderous creatures due to how much is being built-up in the subplots. Subplots which remain consistently uninteresting no matter how many times they may crop up in-between the core events at Freddy’s. It means that much of this feature adaptation of the hit video game franchise feels too busy trying to prove itself as a narrative that it ends up cluttered and therefore not properly developed with the narrative strands that it gives itself. When you also take in the lack of scares it feels as if everything that it does to push itself as a film ends up holding it back.
With horror sequences which fail to scare due to almost misunderstanding the PG-13 angle and a clutter of uninteresting subplots Five Nights At Freddy’s never manages to properly engage due to the fact that the core events and animatronics are given little space and time.
Just A Little Bit Random 