"Five Nights at Freddy's," Universal's and Blumhouse's latest venture, is not only based on the popular video game franchise, which is unplayed by me, but also is clearing up house at the box office. It's made something like over a hundred million dollars, which is crazy when you realize it debuted day-and-date with Universal's own streamer Peacock. That means even more people have watched this.
And that's a shame. All those people spending all that time when they could have gone outside, gone on a walk, breathed in some fresh air- not to mention save a few bucks. The human body was not designed to passively absorb all these cynic innuendos and dour imagery. There's birds chirping to hear; leaves to watch being blown in the wind, so much else to do. And digital entertainment does not need to be so... blah. There's enough of that in the world already.
I have only the faintest idea what the games this movie is based on are about, except that it's about possessed animatronics in a long-abandoned "Chuck E Cheese"-esque pizza parlor. I've watched gameplay of it, the first game anyway I think, and with that bare bones narrative (or what I saw in the brief footage), there's a lot more plot here than I excepted. Maybe it's all in the manual...
It's supposed to be scary, which it isn't, but because of that, I can't in good faith discuss much about the story, but here's the basics: Josh Hutcherson plays Mike, the deadbeat elder brother of Abby, played by Piper Rubio, after their parent's off screen demise. We see him lose his job as a mall security early on due to the convenience of the script, and their evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants to gain full custody. Why? For the monthly checks, Mike believes, but her character is a complete cartoon, vindictive for no reason other than to drive the story along.
So far, there isn't anything necessarily awful about the plot, but the backstory behind Mike is his addiction to sleeping pills. Why is he addicted? So he can dream the same dream about the day his little brother was kidnapped and never seen again. His goal is to remember "who" the abductee is, and his obsession makes up about his entire character arc. Child abuse is a nasty subject for slick entertainment, but wait, there's more! One night while on his new job running security guard at Freddy's, he meets Vanessa, played by Elizabeth Lail, who always seems to know more about the place than she should. She explains that in the 80s, several children went missing there, and their souls live inside the giant, moving, murderous puppets. It's just... all so unpleasant.
A lot of criticism can be directed at her character, as she randomly changes tone, at one point threatening to shoot Mike. What's her problem!? I'd tell you, but I'm not sure the movie even knows.
This is such a disjointed, mess of a movie that it feels like a sort of companion piece to Blumhouse's equally dreadful and equivalently awkward "Halloween Ends," where people die movie deaths betwist plotholes and some extremely clumsy exposition. Not too long into the runtime, the evil aunt hires some local goons to trash Freddy's, so that Mike may lose him job and help her gain custody, but it's just an excuse for some very PG-13 violence. Vanessa then tells Mike about the break-in, who proceeds to cleanup the place. Yeah, not like it's an active crime scene or anything.
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