Since establishing itself as a purveyor of low-budget horror films in the early 21st century, Blumhouse Productions’ occasional hits — 2017’s Get Out, 2022’s M3gan and 2007’s Paranormal Activity come to mind — have been offset by scores of tedious and downright stupid entries that rely mostly on gore to scare up two quick weeks’ worth of business.
Five Nights at Freddy’s definitely belongs in the latter category.
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| Looking more like the vagrants he was hired to keep out of a long-shuttered family arcade and pizzaria, Mike (Josh Hutcherson) finds Vanessa's knowledge of the place to be ... rather unsettling. |
The result is driven less by logic and more by a desire to satisfy the cult-like following that has blossomed since the (frankly boring) game’s 2014 debut, and a subsequent series of best-selling horror novels. (Seriously? The mind doth boggle.)
Although Tammi’s film gets points for a reasonably unsettling first act, it’s sabotaged by an increasingly stupid back-story wedged into these events. Horror films almost always fail when the writer(s) attempt to explain the unexplained; consider the power of the original Halloween’s conclusion, when the “boogeyman’s” disappearance and apparent invulnerability were left as a disturbing mystery.
So.
Following a rash act that would have put him in jail for assault and battery in the real world, woebegone Mike Schmidt (a listless Josh Hutcherson, his career sliding further into the toilet each year) once again is out of work. That’s bad timing; bills are due, and his bitchy Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants him declared an unfit guardian of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), in order to take over and collect the monthly support checks.
Mike has long been haunted by a childhood tragedy, when — briefly left in charge of younger brother Garrett (Lucas Grant), during a family camping trip — he failed to prevent the little boy from being kidnapped. Assisted by sleeping pills and sensory reminders of that incident, Mike keeps trying to “dream” additional details that might identify the kidnapper.
(Question No. 1: Abby, not yet born when the tragedy occurred, appears to be at least 20 years younger than Mike. Since Mike later explains that his mother died years ago, and that his father “split because he couldn’t handle it,” when, precisely, did the little girl come along?)
Abby admittedly is a troubled and antisocial child, who eschews eating and conversation, and prefers sleeping in a makeshift floor tent rather than within the comfort of her bed. But she isn’t “impaired,” a kind social worker insists, merely trying to work her way through stuff.
Thanks to an unusually helpful job placement counselor — Matthew Lillard, as the oddly sinister Steve Raglan — Mike secures a new job as nighttime security officer at the decrepit remnants of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, once a popular game and pizzeria emporium in the mold of Chuck E. Cheese. The place has fallen into disrepair following its closure years ago, but — Raglan explains — the owner can’t bear to tear it down. Ergo, a security guard is needed to prevent vandals from trashing the place.
(Question No. 2: We’ve already seen, during a brief prologue, what happened to the previous security guard. In light of what subsequently goes down, his demise — and his body’s apparent disappearance — make no sense. What did he do wrong? More to the point, if the place is going through security guards on a weekly basis, wouldn’t somebody have noticed by now???)
(Question No.3: Repeated reference is made to bad stuff happening at Freddy Fazbear’s “back in the 1980s” … and yet these events — laden with VCRs, audiocassettes and period clothing styles, and a total absence of computers and smart phones — seem to take place in the ‘80s. Say what?)
Mike’s first night on the job proceeds without incident, although his dreams — he sleeps during most of his shift — become unexpectedly sharp, with peculiar additional details involving five children roughly Garrett’s age. Thanks to the intervention of local cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), when she checks up on “the new guy,” Mike meets the restaurant’s life-size animatronic mascots: Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy. (A rather lethal cupcake remains hidden.)
Right from the start, Vanessa’s behavior is bizarre, and soon downright weird; try as she might, Lail can’t bring any credibility to her performance.
A subplot involving Aunt Jane’s machinations, Abby’s traitorous baby-sitter and that young woman’s degenerate friends, grants an opportunity for well-deserved animatronic revenge early on (the gruesome results of which stretch this film’s too-generous PG-13 rating). Alas, it’s all downhill from there.
The rest of the so-called plot bogs down in a confused muddle of child abduction, ghosts, altered dreams, and the implication that actual bodies somehow are trapped within the animatronic beasties. (After so many years? With no trace of blood or, um, viscera?)
The underlining moral is valuable: that we must not let an obsession with the past interfere with our ability to embrace what’s important in the present. But the delivery system is as clunky as Freddy Fazbear and his cohorts.
(Question No. 4: As slow and herky-jerky as these critters’ movements so often are, how are they suddenly able to materialize not only anywhere within the massive pizzaria’s labyrinthine interior, but also — when required by this numb-nuts script — halfway across town?)
I could go on, but why bother?
In fairness, young Rubio is this film’s one shining jewel; she delivers a delightfully precocious, wholly credible performance. But Hutcherson, Lail and Masterson flail most of the time, as if uncertain how to proceed, from scene to scene … likely because the so-called plot was being made up, moment by moment, during production.
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
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