There are five nights to be survived at cursed old pizza spot Freddy Fazbear’s yet it feels like an awful lot more in this surprisingly flat attempt to turn a hit video game into a hit movie. At a flabby, sign-of-the-times 110 minutes, there’s far too much of so many things – dream sequences, exposition, first act buildup – and far too little of what one would naturally expect from something as surface-level silly as this – fun.
It’s partly because writer-director Emma Tammi and game creator Scott Cawthon, acting as co-writer here, seem frighteningly unsure of how seriously they’re supposed to take Five Nights at Freddy’s and so we’re left equally confused. It clangs from straight-faced speeches about childhood trauma to cartoonish kids’ movie-level goofiness, tonally awkward and strangely, maddeningly dull, unravelling a mystery that’s as predictable as it is uninteresting. A film about murderous animatronic animals should not have one checking their watch quite so much …
