Boring ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ is Five Nights Too Many

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Rating: 1.5/5.0

CHICAGO – For the uninitiated, “Five Nights At Freddy’s” is based on a popular series of video games with a simple premise … you play a security guard trapped inside a Chuck E Cheese-type pizzeria where the animatronics come to life and keep trying to kill you. Yet the biggest threat facing audiences with the film is that they just might die… of boredom. 


The film is created by horror impresarios of the moment, Blumhouse Productions, but this is a largely spook-free affair that has no idea what it wants to be. For example, its animatronic mass murderers don’t even make an appearance until the movie’s half over.

Five Nights at Freddy’s
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Josh Hutcherson (“The Hunger Games”) plays the security guard here with a look on his face as though he were doubting his own life choices. He’s a down on his luck screw up haunted by a past family tragedy and trying to raise a younger sister … whose favorite activity involves making creepy drawings and talking to imaginary friends. He’s Running out of options for steady employment and desperate to keep custody of her in a court battle with his aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson). So he takes a job offer from a shift career counselor (Matthew Lillard) and goes to work as a night security guard at the rundown pizza place. But this scruffy headcase also dopes himself up at nights to return to a recurring memory he has of his brother’s abduction, and is joined by some creepy kids running through a forest.

What does this have to do with a scary animatronic bear and his minions wreaking havoc on those who would invade his lair? Absolutely nothing. It only serves to slow the film to a crawl while we wait for something, anything, to actually happen. He’s frequently visited by a local cop who takes a particular interest in Freddy’s and seems to have a lot of time on her hands.

The film’s tone is all over the place, and it spends the first half trying to create a sympathetic backstory for characters we clearly don’t care about. The film is rated “PG-13” so there’s little gore, and the story moves at pace of its outdated animatronics. The creatures themselves are admirable recreations of the game characters that actually live in the same time and space as the actors.

Gang’s All Here: ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

But even as “murderers,” the action of the animatronics are fairly limited, and they’re more goofy than scary. There’s also a whole child abduction and ghost story element which comes out of nowhere, and is one of those twists that just kind of had you scratching your head.

There are all kinds of bad movies, but “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is the worst kind. It’s not fun bad, it’s just bad and boring. It may have served the material better if they’d gone for the horror comedy angle. What we’ve got instead is more likely to inspire snores than shrieks.

By SPIKE WALTERS Contributor HollywoodChicago.com spike@hollywoodchicago.com