Five Nights at Freddy’s review – horror game movie is an unscary Halloween trick

A competently made yet maddeningly dull attempt to bring the hit video game to the big screen makes for an instantly forgettable night at the movies

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 ...