Lately, the world has been inundated by all the video games that have been made into movies and television series.  Just this year alone there have been The Super Mario Brothers Movie, The Last of Us, Gran Tourismo, and another Peacock property Twisted Metal. The newest property coming to the streaming service Peacock is Five Nights at Freddy’s. Based on the children’s video game.

Mike Schmidt, not the legendary baseball player from the Philadelphia Phillies, (Josh Hutcherson) is a young man who is struggling to keep a job because of his anger issues, and he is the sole guardian of his little sister Abbey (Piper Rubio) When he doesn’t have another choice he decides to take a job at Freddy’s Fazbear Pizza, a Chuck E Cheesesque establishment, as the night security guard against his better judgment. When things start coming alive at Freddy’s he second guesses the decision to take this overnight position leaving his sister alone with the babysitter at night.

Part of the back story of Hutcherson’s character is that he has a recurring dream each night he goes to sleep which reenactments a traumatic situation from his past. He listens to the sounds of a forest and looks at a picture of a wooded area to try and fall asleep at night, but would give anything to find out who was the culprit of his trauma as a twelve-year-old kid. His past plays a big part in what happens to him and his sister going forward in the film. Which isn’t much fun.

The director Emma Tammi uses the video game to create an engaging story that had me invested for about half the film. The second half of the film is filled with contrivance, predictable plot points, and an anticlimactic conclusion that I saw coming a mile away. There were clues left throughout the movie that gave away what was going to happen. Even characters introduced early on were able to foretell future events in the film. The mystery in this story wasn’t that mysterious.

The cast of this movie wasn’t a big one but the main characters were both pretty good. Hutcherson brought a different level than what he was known for in The Hunger Games Trilogy, and other young adult books to film adaptations. The little girl Rubio was unknown to me before this movie but I liked her ability to emote and bring realistic character traits to this character. She was a good choice to play this little girl with family issues. The other cast members young and old were all very effective in creating an interesting story for half the film. Before it got out of whack in the second half.

The story was fascinating for a good part of the movie before the predictability overtook the originality. Not having played the video game brought me to this movie with no expectations. It didn’t take the writers very long to fall back on familiar horror tropes and take me out of the film because I could figure out what was going to transpire very easily. It’s not fun knowing what’s going to happen at the end of a film halfway through it. It makes for a pretty boring second half. This movie had me going through for a while.

I went into Five Nights at Freddy’s without any expectations but it only took about half the film for me to realize that I knew what was going to happen. Despite good performances from Hutcherson and Rubio, this movie was very contrived, predictable, and anticlimactic.  Tammi gave it the old college try but it’s hard to take video games that aren’t meant to be narrative stories and try to put them into film. Which is a narrative business. Maybe people will watch it on Peacock though rather than having it released in theaters. 

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen