Killer robots tale might have been better as splatterfest
“Five Nights at Freddy’s” isn’t half as scary as the parent-vs.-parent brawls I witnessed a few years ago at Chuck E. Cheese’s, but that’s another story.
Let’s talk about this story.
Creator Scott Cawthon’s Chuck E.inspired 2014 gameplay phenomenon takes place in a decrepit Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzajoint, with the requisite ball pit, wonky electrical wiring and the smell of death, with a whiff of sheet cake. Its threatening animatronic creatures — a bear, a bunny, a one-pawed fox, a face-eating robo-bird — run the place at night, and are inhabited by the disintegrating bodies and tortured souls of children who … well, spoiler there, sorry — moving on.
In the game, you take the role of night security guard Mike. You monitor the barely functional surveillance cameras and, once the robot killers come for you, you try to stay alive. There’s a labyrinth of backstory, but designer Cawthon’s simple set-up begat many sequels and a welter of spinoffs and subreddits and fan theories. Now, it’s a movie.
And? It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions. Full-on R-rated sadism? Half the gaming world is already mad about the movie not going in that direction. Instead, the filmmakers chose to squeak by with a PG-13, leaning away from five nights of steadily mounting carnage, and toward a layer of new material devoted to Mike’s horrific childhood, depicted in nightmares. These take him back to the campground where Mike’s brother was abducted, never to be found.
Mike’s current life is much the same as his dream state: stuck, bereft and looking for answers. He’s doing all he can to retain custody of his younger sister (Piper Rubio). Here, we run into what the film industry has referred to for more than a century as “story problems.”
Cawthon and fellow screenwriters Seth Cuddeback and Emma Tammi take an interest in developing the central brother-sister relationship. It works, sometimes; as Mike, Josh Hutcherson (“The
Hunger Games”) draws you into a character’s sullen mind persuasively. But there’s a ton of complication here.
The adaptation veers from scenes of Mike’s dream state, to the young thugs employed by Mike’s evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) to discredit Mike, so she can gain custody of her niece. A kindly police officer (Elizabeth Lail) knows more about Fazbear’s than she’s telling. And there’s the unsettling job counselor (Matthew Lillard) who sets up Mike as Fazbear’s newest night watchman.
I don’t care much about neatness with genre exercises, but this one’s pretty sludgy. I do care about, and resist, the film’s attempt to be a cuddly version of “Saw.” To keep the PG-13 rating intact, the camera cuts away just before the splurch. This means millions of 8-year-olds will likely be at the multiplexes in a funk, alongside older kids and young adults steeped in nostalgia for the hours they spent at home being Mike.
Two years ago, Cawthon’s rightwing political views provoked considerable online blowback from former fans. In the movie, there’s a scene where Mike longs for the traditional God-fearing family taken away from him so cruelly. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is entirely about the cruelty, and would’ve made more sense as an R-verging-on-X splatterfest.
MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violent content, bloody images, and language)
Running time: 1:50
How to watch: In theaters and streaming on Peacock