Movie Review: Five Nights at Freddy’s is a horror that is not worth it

As we already mentioned before, video game adaptations to the big and small screen have suffered great failures, since the 90’s this genre has not been able to find a balance between a good story and a good director.

Within this genre, we have the horror subgenre which has not done very well at the box office either, in 2023 one more adaptation hits the big screen, Five Nights at Freddy’s, a supernatural horror film based on the video game franchise of the same name created by Scott Cawthon, which has enjoyed great success among locals and strangers.

The video game saga also has adaptations in novels, comics, and endless merchandising that includes collectible figures, stuffed animals, t-shirts, posters, notebooks, etc. The premise is simple, it puts the player in the character of a night security guard who watches a local pizzeria, the goal is to survive five nights in a row, and each level becomes increasingly scarier.

What is the film about?

Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) goes through a family trauma, without money he is hired as a night security guard to work at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, what seems to be a quiet night at work he soon realizes that surviving in that place will not be not easy.

This type of cinematographic work must have the basics necessary so that the viewer who has never played the game has the necessary elements to understand the plot, likewise for those who already know it, that balance is what defines whether it will be successful or not, this genre With its subgenres and what it occupies, it is very difficult to adapt, its base story has already been outlined and there is very little that can be modified.

Having said the above, we already have a fixed idea of what to expect, the game is about surviving an abandoned Chuck-E-Cheese where monstrous murderous beings live, when we talk about environments and scenarios that would be creepy whether abandoned or not, haunted or This place is not one of them, its atmosphere must be enveloping and keep us expecting that something terrible can happen at any moment.

Establishing the rules imposed by the genre, we must be faced with a place that not only scares us but makes us feel it, in these cases the visual is what is taken into account the most, along with this, a well-established plot that develops the subplots very well. and have an ending that leaves us satisfied with the possibility that there will be more installments and that each one of these will be more terrifying, without losing track of what the plots on which it is based are, by saying that it is based we hope that stick as closely as possible to what is known and not take creative liberties to give it a different personality.

We can say that the film as a final product has elements that can be used very well, we have a small cast, few locations, and a plot that can go from being simple to complicated, the execution of its action must live up to or exceed the expectations that are based on the video game but this does not happen here, this is done so that adults like it and that teenagers also like it without having to be extremely explicit.

We do not know exactly what director Emma Tammi wanted to do with this material, the script written by Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback, and Tammi herself does not have such a solid foundation that it can sustain gore entertainment for adults, the plot, although Based on the video game, the subplots are the ones that fall far below what was expected, we know that Mike Schmidt’s character suffers from a family tragedy because his brother was kidnapped, hence all his traumas come from, we have Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) a police officer who is investigating the first crime that opens the tape, then we have Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard) who hires this guy as a security guard, then we have Abby (Piper Rubio) Schmidt’s little sister.

As the story develops on the screen we can see that there are long and meaningless sequences that create subplots that do not conclude anything and that only fall into the comfort zone of extending longer than necessary, distracting from all the action that should have occurred. , the moment in which it is revealed that these animatronic dolls possess the souls of children who were kidnapped and murdered no longer has a strong impact, when we expect that at the end of a twist that will excite us and take this to the place it should be. Having no impact either, the revelation that Steve Raglan is the one who kidnapped children including Schmidt’s brother is very guessable and not at all surprising.

This has characters that resemble those of its base material, having all the necessary elements to make this a successful film franchise as a quality product it does not fulfill what it promises and remains a deficient product that is just waiting to be, It’s like the slightly more mature version of the series Are you afraid of the dark? which was basically for children, the same thing happens with this film, there are no sequences of violence that should be violently explicit, everything that happens off screen and its director fails to leave it to the viewer’s imagination, which is a great stupidity. because what we want to see is exactly that.

The biggest flaw it has is very evident, this wants to be popular at the box office, causing morbidity and a movement in which all those involved attend and are partially satisfied with the misleading promise that it will be a franchise in which things are told and developed. little by little to maintain interest, it loses its place in the horror genre because it is more focused on entertaining and advocating for the nostalgia of those who played the video game but also to attract new generations.

It is to be expected that in a work like this that does not intend to enrich or contribute anything to the genre it occupies, there is its family message, the importance of working as a team, of not losing hope, overcoming our traumas and being better people, than all the bad things. It has a good side, that we must believe that everything can change for the better, and everything above fails, they are good messages of that we have no doubt but they are very poorly placed because we are in a supposed horror movie where exactly the opposite is going to happen.

Another very obvious flaw that we found is its production design, from its opening credits things do not go well, it is not clear if they are making a tribute to the horror B movies of the 70s and 80s or it is making fun Of that, the design of the animatronics complies but it is not what would be expected, what could be extremely terrifying is just a bunch of stuff, not to mention that they appear very little, which should be a spectacular appearance as we all expected from Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy remains on a very secondary level.

The setting goes from being a location to being a studio with very little care in its details, there are television series with a lower budget that achieve much more than what happens here, everything it achieves and promises will be in its first minutes of production. Diluting to nothing, the plot becomes repetitive, heavy, and boring, its best moments are when we wait for something to happen with the dolls and nothing happens.

Its ending leaves us thinking that what we have just seen is a plagiarism of the best moments of films like Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Saw, Halloween, or When a Stranger Calls. It happens that everything is left open for a possible sequel, everything concludes with a post-credits scene that tells us that this can continue.

There was an opportunity to make this a multimillion-dollar and successful fan franchise that would vindicate the genre, instead, we were left with something that could have been and was not, we were left with a forced drama and black humor that is not funny, with very weak ones that could have been deeper, we were left wanting to see something with much more dedication and production and of course more gore.

The cast is made up of Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Matthew Lillard who do what they can with what they have, good actors with a terrible script where there is not much to do and almost nothing to develop.

The music composed by The Newton Brothers complies with having the dolls’ songs and those pieces that help raise an almost non-existent tension, a good job that would sound much better in another project.

In conclusion, Five Nights at Freddy’s is an adaptation that fell far short of what could be expected from a source that has been successful in recent years, a completely mediocre film that aims to be horror for those who feel nostalgic for a game, one more opportunity that is lost for something that we repeatedly mentioned on purpose could have been better.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is now out in theaters across the country.