Review: 'Five Nights at Freddy's' is a bizarrely listless horror dud

The staggeringly incoherent "Five Nights at Freddy's" should be a slam dunk: It's based on a hugely popular video game series and is built around a band of killer animatronics from a retro family-style pizza and gaming establishment, the kind that all gave us nightmares as kids. What could go wrong?

Well, everything. Maudlin, drab, tonally bizarre and thematically unintelligible, "Five Nights at Freddy's" feels like a stark, vaguely supernatural family drama shoehorned into a franchise-ready piece of intellectual property. Only fans who come to hear the game's catchphrases and callbacks will feel seen, anyone else is better off bellying up to the bar at their local Chuck E. Cheese.

Josh Hutcherson, who at 31 still looks 16, stars as Mike Schmidt — no relation to the former Philadelphia Phillies third baseman — a shopping mall security guard with a seriously traumatic past. Mike's brother was kidnapped when they were kids and Mike blames himself, and he spends his time studying dream therapy, looking for ways to extract clues about his brother's disappearance from deep within his subconscious.

Mike is caretaker of his kid sister Abby (Piper Rubio), while his aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) is trying to leverage the court system to gain custody of her. So how, exactly, does a gang of killer animatronics from a retro family-style pizza and gaming establishment fit into all this? That's the problem: It doesn't.

But ah, here we go. After he's laid off from the mall, Mike is offered a job as the night caretaker at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place, a shuttered 1980s arcade and birthday party venue with one of those creepy, dead-eyed animatronic bands that performs "Happy Birthday" and the hits of the day, in this case Detroit hitmakers' the Romantics' "Talking in Your Sleep." And when they're not performing, the robots come alive... and they kill! Well, sometimes they do. They certainly come alive, and they're not friendly. Except when they are friendly, to some people? Hey, um, what's the deal with these robots?

That's another problem with "Five Nights at Freddy's," it can't figure out what's the deal with these robots. Are they funny? Are they scary? There's several of them — a bear, a chicken, a rabbit, maybe a fox? — and they're given an entirely convoluted backstory, involving being possessed by children's ghosts. They're certainly not possessed with personalities, and there's not much for these lumbering mechanisms to do once they come alive, other than remind you of that video of the Rock-afire Explosion performing Usher's "Love in this Club" that went viral about 19 iterations of the internet ago. Man, that video was great.

As for the narrative in this movie, it just doesn't fly, and "Five Nights at Freddy's" keeps getting in its own way with its convoluted storyline involving kidnappings and dream logic. Mike is given a cop friend, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who doesn't seem to have any other duties on her beat except hanging around an abandoned pizza shack. Matthew Lillard is on board as a job recruiter who hires Mike and sends him on his way to Freddy's, where the pay is terrible and the hours are even worse. Why, pray tell, does he do that? The answer is more boring than you'd think.

Director Emma Tammi, who also co-wrote the screenplay, never quite figures out what "Five Nights at Freddy's" is, whether it's a straightforward horror movie, a psychological thriller, a winking horror comedy or a drama infused with elements of the "Five Nights at Freddy's" franchise, which was launched a decade ago and encompasses more than a dozen video games and spinoff titles, graphic novels, books, toy lines and more. Even the simple geography of Freddy Fazbear's, which seems to have miles of cavernous hallways and backrooms, doesn't make sense. "Can you survive 'Five Nights at Freddy's?'" asks the movie's tagline. Turns out two hours is more than enough.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Five Nights at Freddy's'

GRADE: D

Rated PG-13: for strong violent content, bloody images and language

Running time: 110 minutes

In theaters and on Peacock