Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)

After agreeing to work nights as a security guard at an abandoned themed restaurant named Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) mostly sleeps and dreams of the childhood kidnapping of his younger brother, but is conscious just long enough to realise that's something's not quite right with the animatronic mascots in his new workplace. Soon they appear to have turned their obscure intentions toward his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and Mike makes it his mission to stop history repeating itself, even as he begins to suspect Freddy's may have a connection to his brother's disappearance.

An adaptation of the "Five Nights at Freddy's" videogame series, Emma Tammi's movie takes a paper-thin plot and stretches it over an obnoxious 110 minute runtime without delivering the kind of pay-off that would come close to justifying it. Like the animatronics that provide what few fleeting moments of interest the movie has, it's a robotic, clunky contraption, enhanced though it is by Josh Hutcherson's game performance and a welcome supporting turn from Matthew Lillard. If it were a lot faster paced and a lot bloodier, it might have worked in a "Willy's Wonderland" kind of way, but unfortunately this movie is tameness personified, bereft of the violence and wacky action it ought to be delivering in the absence of an interesting story. That its director has insisted the PG-13 tone has 'landed' and an R-rated cut isn't necessary is actually kind of laughable considering how basic the movie actually is. Maybe players of the games will feel differently but as a horror film fan this did very little for me, even if it's technically well made.