Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ on Prime Video, a Video Game Adaptation About Animatronic Creatures Gone Rogue

Five Nights at Freddy’s (now streaming on Prime Video) adapts a hit video game franchise that, as all hit franchises of any medium do, sprawls out into books, toys, comics and other highly profitable merchandise. And as these things always go, Now It’s A Movie Exclamation Point, starring Josh Hutcherson as the security guard character you control during the game, and who keeps watch over an old abandoned funcenter populated by towering animatronic animals who sing and dance and murder people. Will it be the rare video-game-turned-film that’s actually good, or another future entry in the Movies We Forgot Existed canon?

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Mike Schmidt (Hutcherson) is a mall security guard so damaged by past tragedies that it results in him losing his job. See, years ago, his brother was kidnapped and never was seen again, and now, he thinks a man in the mall is kidnapping a kid so Mike tackles him and pounds him and then learns the guy is the boy’s father. Oops. Made an assumption. Jumped to a conclusion. And now Mike has to go home and find a way to support his kid sister Abby (Piper Rubio) so he has some ammunition in his battle against their shitty shitty aunt Jane’s (Mary Stuart Masterson) attempt to wrest custody from him. Times are tough.

Mike has recurring nightmares of the day his brother was taken; sometimes, five children appear in the dream and watch as he stands helpless, watching the boy disappear into the woods. In one of the dreams, he’s wounded and when he wakes up, the wound is still there. Weird, but it’s probably nothing, because the movie pretty much treats it as probably nothing and we all forget it ever happened – but I didn’t, because I take notes. Anyway, Mike reads a dogeared copy of a book titled Dream Theory in an attempt to better understand what the hell is going on in his head. Meanwhile, Abby is an odd little kid who doesn’t say much and spends all her time drawing pictures, and only has imaginary friends. Is all this garbage in this and the preceding paragraph in the video game? I’m not sure, but I sure hope not, because it’s dull and stultifying in a ridiculous movie about homicidal robot mascots.

And now we finally get to the homicidal robot mascots – let’s call ’em HRMs – about 40 minutes into this drag-ass thing. No rush, I guess. A greasy weirdo of a career counselor (Matthew Lillard) gives Mike a job at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a kiddie entertainment joint that likely saw its last customer during the Clinton administration. He’ll be the night watchman, dozing off at a desk lined with security-cam monitors. The HRMs aren’t homicidal yet – there’s gotta be a buildup to that, a really long buildup, and I mean really long, too long, so long, the movie almost dares you to turn it off. So at first, the HRMs just sit there, lifeless, a lot like the movie they’re in. Nobody’s been to Freddy’s in eons, so at first it’s an easy gig that affords him the freedom to doze off and revisit the same dream over and over again, much to our chagrin, and our annoyance, and our glaring lack of interest. A cop named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) frequently stops by to hang out with him because there apparently are no crimes being committed anywhere else that she could be doing something about. She also knows a thing or two about the HRMs, which comes in handy when they finally, after what feels like weeks, decide to become homicidal. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A Freddy’s movie was in development hell for many years, during which a hacky knockoff called Willy’s Wonderland was released, starring Nicolas Cage as a weirdo who battles HRMs. In spite of Cage’s typically eccentric participation, Willy’s sucked butt almost as much as Freddy’s does.

Performance Worth Watching: Gotta mention that Hutcherson, who’s not always the most expressive actor, really sleepwalks through this one. Maybe Lillard elicits a smile or two in his goofy turn, but any OTT overtures he might’ve indulged as an eccentric supporting character seem to have been stifled by the overall wet-blanketness of this thing. 

Memorable Dialogue: One line of dialogue sums up about a dozen scenes’ worth of dreadful exposition that could’ve been left to rot on the editing room floor: “Ghost children possessing giant robots? Thanks for the heads-up,” Mike says.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Five Nights at Freddy’s is mirthless, witless dross with no style, no sense of pace, no comedy, no drama and no scares. For some reason, a relatively simple video game premise – security guard attempts to survive attacking HRMs – is here gummed up by great viscous wads of who-cares plot frippery that renders the film a toneless drag. Staring down the barrel of adapting a beloved, cultish-but-more-than-just-cult-hit game series, director Emma Tammi seems to have stood at a crossroads between sticking to the atmospheric horror-kitsch of the source material and fleshing out the formula so it has some emotional agency, and therefore is more fitting for the cinematic medium. She leans so heavily on the latter component, it significantly compromises everything that made the game so popular.

It seems as if adapting Freddy’s to film was a possibly thankless task; Tammi attempts to balance moldy ’80s nostalgia with the gimmickry of the premise, some new-school character psychology (read: trauma! In the 2020s, everything is about trauma) and devotion to existing IP. It’s strange that the end result is so wildly miscalculated, landing in a dead space between genres, and likely to alienate newcomers and Freddy’s fans alike. Franchise devotees will find a little more traction here via inside-baseball references and the initial thrill of seeing their beloved HRMs Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy and that WTF sentient cupcake come to life by way of some nifty practical effects. Beyond that, the movie commits the indefensible crime of being no fun whatsoever.

Our Call: Five Nights at Freddy’s? More like Five Nights at Deaddy’s. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.