Movie Review: Five Nights At Freddy's

I’ve been watching the hype for the “Five Nights At Freddy’s” movie on TikTok and decided to give it a watch, so you don’t have to.

The movie follows Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson, as he takes a nightly security guard job at Freddy Frazbear’s Pizzeria to make ends meet while taking care of his younger sister Abby.

When we first meet Mike, he’s struggling to keep a job due to the effects of the childhood trauma of his brother being abducted. His mother is dead and his father is no longer in the picture, leaving Mike to raise Abby by himself.

At his mall security job, Mike sees a distraught child being grabbed by an adult, he automatically assumes the child is being abducted. He chases them through the mall before publicly tackling and assaulting the parent. Mike’s actions result in him getting fired and having to go back on the job hunt.

The only job available for him is a nightly security guard at the formerly popular kids’ restaurant Freddy Frazbear’s Pizzeria which is basically Chucky Cheese in this universe.  This job is supposed to be easy for Mike who just has to make sure no one breaks into the building by watching the security cameras.

As he’s not used to working at night, he ends up falling asleep at the pizzeria and his reoccurring dream about his brother’s abduction evolves to include children he’s never dreamt of before. He approaches the children in his dream asking if they know who abducted his brother and where he is now.

The children in his dream turn out to be ghosts that died in the pizzeria and they tell Mike what happened to his brother. None of the information they told him was shocking and could’ve been guessed early on in the movie.

One night he brings Abby to the pizzeria and the on-stage animatronic characters come to life and befriend her. The Animatronics are a part of a band with Freddy, who the restaurant is named after being the lead singer. Freddy is a brown bear, Bonnie is a purple bunny and Chica is a yellow chicken who holds a cupcake animatronic. There was also Foxy, a red fox that’s the most deteriorated out of all of them with some metal parts of the limbs visible.  

For a horror movie, the animatronics were not visually terrifying other than Foxy, who was simply ugly and needed to be put back in the box. They did have different attitudes and personas, which were slightly entertaining. Their attitudes and personas were expressed through blinking or squinting their yellow glowing eyes and body language.

Mike also meets Vanessa, a cop who keeps coming around the pizzeria for a reason later revealed towards the end of the movie. Vanessa’s character was useless and did not contribute much to the evolution of the slow plot.

The plot seemed slow with several long pauses that were supposed to be suspenseful but weren’t to me. The plot wasn’t complex making it easy to guess which made it feel like it was dragging on.

The jump scares in the movie also didn’t scare me as they were predictable. Again, nothing appeared offsetting or terrifying in the movie to live up to the horror categorization.

All the excitement surrounding the movie forgot to mention it was rated PG-13 and for children but that’s also on me for not doing research. I think for a child the movie may have been scary but for an adult who’s never played the game by the same name it wasn’t scary at all.

I mainly watched the movie for Josh Hutcherson and to learn about the Five Nights At Freddy’s lore. I was also informed the movie changed the game lore a bit which may be angering for game players.

I would rate this movie a five out of ten. If you’d like to waste your time, Five Nights At Freddy’s is available for streaming on Peacock.