Five Nights at Freddy’s

Directed by Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s follows down-on-his-luck Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) as he reluctantly takes on a nighttime security-guard position within a long-since closed family restaurant – where, eventually, the character finds himself forced to battle demonic animatronic rodents. It’s a gleefully over-the-top premise that could (and should) have resulted in a fun, briskly-paced horror movie, and yet, in the hands of Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s primarily comes off as an impossibly sluggish and increasingly interminable ordeal that contains little worth embracing or getting excited about – with the movie’s arms-length atmosphere compounded by Tammi’s often astonishingly styleless visuals and a narrative that grows more and more difficult to follow as it unfolds. (The latter paves the way for an inscrutable second half that rarely makes any sense, which, perhaps inevitably, cancels out the few instances of blood and violence that eventually do start to crop up.) The aggressively overlong running time and proliferation of pointless digressions, with the latter exemplified by a recurring emphasis on Mike’s thoroughly tedious dream exploits, ensure that the movie runs out of steam long before it arrives at its endless (and thoroughly anticlimactic) finale, which ultimately cements Five Nights at Freddy’s place as a hopelessly inept and interminable misfire of epic proportions. (Seriously, how do you mess up a setup as foolproof as this one?)

1/2* out of ****