Note: Everything that could be perceived as a spoiler that I talk about in this review was in the trailers, which probably got into the spoiler territory a bit too much, so only read this review if you don’t want to know a whole lot about the movie.

Growing up, I played the Five Nights at Freddy’s games just a little bit, but I mainly remember watching streamers play on YouTube. I never truly got into the franchise, but I did definitely enjoy watching those videos and even stressing myself out when playing them. Safe to say, I don’t know anything when it comes to even the most basic of lore in this IP, and so most of this story was all new to me (obviously including the stuff that wasn’t in the games at all).

Overall, I didn’t think this was good at all and it all came down to the writing and the script. I’ll start off by talking about the story, because it was probably the least bad thing (at least until the end). Was it pretty generic? Yeah. Fairly predictable? Absolutely. But it still held my interest for the most part though I definitely wouldn’t say I was invested. I think having someone like the main character, Mike, played by Josh Hutcherson, being an older brother raising his sister could have been pretty compelling, but it just unfortunately didn’t end up being that way.

I didn’t like the whole thing about his past, the thing he kept having dreams about. That was the main connection they made between him and the animatronics, and it just didn’t work for me at all. Mike was a stale character, which I’ll get more into soon, and never actually portrayed the sorrow or trauma that should have come with his past. He just simply kept having random dreams about it, and that was about it. And then the whole thing with who the animatronics really are, though I’ve heard it’s accurate to the actual lore of the games, I didn’t like or find interesting whatsoever. It was incredibly, again, generic, and didn’t seem like something that took a whole lot of time to come up with.

And then moving onto another big problem with the writing, the characters. I also put part of the blame on the actors and directing, though I think the writing was certainly the main problem. None of these characters were even the slightest bit interesting except for the guy played by Matthew Lillard, who I remember from the Scooby-Doo movies from when I was a kid, though he was barely in this movie. When it came to Abby, Mike’s little sister, I found her extremely annoying, weird, and the main product of a common problem in horror movie scripts that I’ll get to in the next section.

The main problem with horror movie scripts is that the intellect of characters is quite often just completely ignored in order to make the scary moments happen. This was a gigantic problem with this movie. It first starts off with a bunch of guys that enter Five Nights at Freddy’s, but mainly it has to do with Mike and his little sister. First off, you’re telling me that there weren’t any other jobs that Mike could have gotten that would have been better? I mean seriously, I know his resume probably isn’t, to say the least, great, after what he did at the beginning of the film, but there is no way he couldn’t have found another job. I just didn’t buy it. Then when crazy stuff starts to happen, he seems mostly chill (which made the movie less scary and intense by the way) and continues to do the job! Like whom, in their right mind, would keep this job? After that, and I kid you not, he brings his little sister to work with him! This is not a spoiler, as it was very clearly shown in the trailer. I mean, the intelligence of this guy. A little bit after that, despite all the whack stuff that Mike had already experienced, he lets his sister become friends with the animatronics. Unbelievable, just unbelievable.

Then comes my biggest problem with the film (yeah, I know, I’ve already criticized this movie heavily) - it’s not even the tiniest bit scary. I don’t tend to get scared during horror movies, but I can still easily tell the parts and scenes that should be scary. There was absolutely nothing about this film where I got this or even felt the tiniest bit of tension. It relies almost entirely on jump scares, which is both a cheap way to make a movie “scary,” and something that never does anything for me. I think the main reason why it wasn’t scary was because the animatronics were shown way, way too much. When it comes to building suspense and thrills, I always say to look at movies like Jaws and Alien. What made those movies so intense? Jaws rarely showed the shark, and Alien rarely showed the xenomorph, which added a sense of mystery and intrigue along with thrill and suspense. Then, whenever they did eventually pop up on screen, it was impactful.

Five Nights at Freddy’s (the movie) is the complete opposite of those two films when it comes to this. The animatronics are shown all throughout the movie. This could have been fine, because they are often shown in the games just standing there, which helps make the game intense, but this movie doesn’t actually do that. The animatronics are commonly shown moving around, interacting with characters, and I’m not joking, being friendly with them.

Then comes the third act with the climax and reveals - they just weren’t satisfying at all and made my thoughts on the movie even more clear than they were before. Everything about it is underwhelming. The answers we get, the big climactic intense moments, the conclusion, didn’t really help the thoughts that I had already had on the film any better. In fact, they made them worse.

I know I’ve not really said anything positive about this movie, but there were still some redeeming qualities that made this get a 4/10 and not lower for me. For one, despite the fairly low budget, the practical effects and designs for the animatronics were very, very well done. Five Nights at Freddy’s itself did a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the games too and was really pleasant to look at. The visuals were also handled well, with some really decent lighting that stood out in parts to me. The pacing was fine too, and though I found the movie shallow, I still had a decently enjoyable time with it and wouldn’t say I was ever too bored.

The writing was just not good, which was why I had a hard time saying or getting anything positive from it.