Five Nights at Freddy’s Review
Rating:2.5 out of 5 Knightheads
Directed by Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a 2023 horror film adapting the massively successful video game franchise of the same name. The movie follows Mike Schmidt, a man taking care of his sister, who is hired to be a security guard at a old rundown children’s pizza restaurant, where the animatronics come to life (horror hijinks ensue).
I would like to preface this review by saying that I was not a fan of the franchise coming into the movie. Most of my exposure to FNAF comes from a very good friend of mine spouting its lore to me in a loud high school cafeteria. I think the best way to get an unbiased review of the movie is by not being a fan of the series going in. I was not biased towards the series before, so my opinion is entirely unaltered by preconceived love of any kind. If you do want to hear what a passionate FNAF fan has to say about the movie, read the other review the Knight Krier published for this movie. I think with this kind of movie, it is good to hear from both sides.
This film’s writing was very generic. The characters were uninteresting, mostly one note, and underdeveloped. The plot was a good representation of the game’s lore from my understanding, but was not executed in a particularly interesting way. It had several classic horror movie tropes in it that were pretty frustrating at times. I think it could have benefited from having the villain have more of a presence in the movie, as they only have two scenes throughout. There were a lot of scenes that were laughably bad because of really dumb logic and characters acting unorthodoxly solely for the sake of the plot.
The acting in this movie was pretty mediocre. The lead actor Josh Hutcherson’s performance was good enough for what was needed for the role, but nothing to write home about. The actress who played Mike’ sister, Abby, was pretty good for a child actress. I bet Matthew Lillard could have been great in this movie if he was given more screen time and more material to work with, but as it stands, his performance was not memorable. The standout performance of the movie was definitely Elizabeth Lail as-actually I’m not gonna say who she played because even I, a non FNAF fan, got a little kick out of them revealing who she was and even if they said her name in the marketing, I’m not gonna spoil her name just in case. Lail gave a performance that made her character never feel completely genuine and it created a sense of unease around her, which I found really impressive.
The best thing about this movie was the animatronics. They all looked amazing, as they were all real animatronics and not CGI or anything (which was really refreshing to see in this day and age), and the scenes where the animatronics got to deal some damage were really fun and enjoyable, though not even the tiniest bit scary. I wish the movie had more horror scenes and less of the bland plot stuff. This is not an opinion I would usually have about any movie, as screenplays are my favorite thing about movies, but the writing was just so uninteresting here that I would have preferred if they leaned more into the fact that it was a horror movie. However, I think the horror scenes still left much to be desired, as they were bogged down by the fact that the movie was rated PG-13, and not rated R. I get why from a business perspective they would make it PG-13, but I think the horror scenes would have been greatly improved if they were allowed to be more intense, as a PG-13 rating can often limit the creativity of certain sequences in movies, especially when it comes to genres such as action and definitely horror.
The cinematography was surprisingly pretty cool at times and I enjoyed how some shots were framed. It was nothing groundbreaking, but I appreciated the passion that it conveyed. However, the original score for this movie felt very uninspired throughout and just like a typical horror movie score, which was expected for this type of movie, even though I still wish they hired a composer with a more creative vision.
Overall, the movie was relatively entertaining, especially during the scenes that were attempting to be scary, but the writing, score, and the majority of the acting were very forgettable. For those reasons, I am giving this movie 2.5 out of 5 Knightheads.
