‘Five Nights At Freddys Review: Animatronic Horror Film Is Completely Lifeless
Even when Five Nights at Freddy's was a video game, the franchise was always more watched than played. Low-budget indie game released in 2014 The basic point-and-click game revolves around watching CCTV feeds and pressing certain buttons to turn on certain lights and close certain doors. But Passion Project, created after the developer (seriously) mastered Christian-themed games, has become a phenomenon with reaction videos circulating on social media, from players screaming to being scared. Noun moderate spark.
In this context, the simultaneous release of the film adaptation in theaters and in theaters, usually a sign of a lack of faith in the project, seems oddly fitting. Streaming recreates the horror of single-player games on your PC, and going to the cinema helps bring back the community terror that made the franchise a sensation.
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There is just one problem. It's hard to imagine anyone, even the young audiences who made Five Nights at Freddy's so popular, reacting so strongly to what happens on screen in director Emma Tammy's mediocre version of the film. The original Five Nights at Night may not be a horror video game masterpiece on the level of Resident Evil or Silent Hills, but it certainly has a cheap appeal to the sudden brilliance of a rotting animatronic stuffed animal. The bear is viciously biting your laptop screen. Not even Five Nights at Freddy's can do that. The unique jump scares it induces are a hilarious punch. The PG-13 rating feels like an awkward marriage between an original horror movie and a kid's Halloween movie, with absolutely no genre advantage in the resulting work.
After a literally unmentionable introduction that reminds us of what would have happened if Saw hadn't been rated R (answer: it would have been bad), Five Nights at Freddy's begins a story that accomplishes a lot. Screen Time Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike, a carefree blue-collar worker dealing with the childhood trauma of his brother's kidnapping and a perfect family on an ideal camping trip to Nebraska. Nowadays, he's a disillusioned adult who's fired from his job as a mall security guard after attacking his father, whom he mistakes for a child thief (if you thought the movie would show that violent scene in an interesting way, you'll understand the rise of hope). , he finds himself in the office of a violent consultant (Matthew Lillard telegraphs, so it's obvious his character winks, insults your intelligence). The job he offers pays very little and has the worst hours; The long-closed family entertainment center works as a night watchman at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, where his only job is to break the animatronics of the cartoon's main character and his gang. As the sole caretaker of her much younger sister Abi (Piper Rubio), she initially turns down the role due to the late hours.
But she also has an A-type aunt (Mary Stewart Masterson, the only funny person in the film) who convinces her to leave Abhi, and with little choice, she accepts the offer. At first glance, the job doesn't seem that bad, it mostly involves sleeping a lot in the security room (detailed designed to look like the dirty little kid in the original game). But the five nights he stayed at his job, two things quickly became apparent. First, Freddy, along with Bonnie Rabbit, Chica the Chicken and Foxy the Pirate Fox, look scary in their awkward night scene. Second, they are also alive.
It seems like an appropriate setup for a silly but fun slasher like M3gan, which mostly plays it straight but with an awareness that shows it's in on the joke. The problem is that the film, surprisingly, falls short of this most obvious place. For too long, the film hides any fear or danger from the animatronics, which at first seems like a slow experiment, but instead turns out to be a serious miscalculation of how scary a movie needs to be. It seems real. . Movie horror movie. Aside from a completely unnecessary mid-movie sequence where Abby's nanny Max (Kat Connor Sterling) and her brother break into the facility late at night, this is the only memorable kill by Five Nights at Freddy's. The plot and action, involving cartoon killer robots, unfold in the last 20 minutes of the film. The rest of the movie is filled with mostly nothing.
Tammy, a horror filmmaker whose previous work includes the hard-hitting Hulu anthology series Into the Dark, co-wrote the film with Cawthon and Seth Cudback, and most of the film's failings stemmed from a really dead script. The screenplay has a zombie pace that drags out the narrative for an hour and fifty minutes that a 90 minute plot cannot sustain. These extra minutes can be attributed to mindless repetition; There are so many flashbacks and dream sequences of the camping trip where Mike's brother disappears, that you'll see more Nebraska forests than you see Freddy Fazbear. The plot often seems literal to children, because it is aggressive, so clumsy and obvious that it is impossible to miss even a hint of the climax (unless you realize that the pictures will eventually become a puzzle). (Lucky for you, after teacher Abi gave an incredibly long speech about the importance of art in a child's development for no reason).
In dealing with such vulnerable material, all actors are behind the curve. Hutcherson as Mike is completely vanilla, with so little character it's hard to imagine anyone fitting the role. As you Elizabeth Lyle the enigmatic policewoman Vanessa is more robotic than Freddie and friends, but the character is so poorly written, hiding unnecessary things and hiding things so clearly that she has no emotions. The actor couldn't do it. Do something with him, do something other than anger. A lot of time devoted to Mike's story and his relationship with Abi doesn't allow the audience to connect with his dynamic because Abi isn't a character at all. The aunt's initially sensitive comment that she is "mentally ill" implies that the girl has special needs or behavioral problems; The script doesn't even bother to clarify enough to provide a modicum of specificity.
Even when the film eventually diverges from the narrative core it dives into unnecessarily and delivers the original experience one would expect from an adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy's, it really falls short. The direction destroys potential excitement with sloppy editing and staging that's both too obvious (Freddy and his friends are often just framed rather than properly developed) and frustratingly vague (the geography of Fozbear's pizza is never clearly defined). The animatronics are faithfully recreated from the games themselves, but instead of the original's muddy graphics in real-time, they look shiny and brand new, old and barely functional, like new model structures rather than actual characters. The same can be said for the film's design and production aesthetic, which can be described as a staple of 80s Stranger Things , only the arcade-inspired opening titles have anything resembling Ross. If part of the appeal of the original was its one-dimensional, low-budget charm, the film feels antiseptic, lacking the dust and grit to give it any flavor or personality.
The Haunting of Chuck E. A movie about a cheese clone shouldn't be hard to watch But Five Nights at Freddy's somehow misses the point of Woodland Arcade, undermining the obvious appeal of animatronic cartoon characters as slasher villains and refusing to be a true horror film. The result is similar to the sleeping pills Mike takes while on security duty, too bloodless and tasteless to fuel the YouTube frenzy best known for Five Nights at Freddy's. Even non-fiction movie fans would be better off staying home and watching two hours of Five Nights at Freddy's reaction videos. So there is infinitely more to fear.
Universal Pictures will release Five Nights at Freddy's Theater and Peacock Theaters on October 27.
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