"Five Nights At Freddy's" - Review

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is fired from his job as a security guard after beating the shit out of a man in a mistaken case of identity. His career counsellor (Matthew Lillard, always a treat) offers him a gig as a night watchman at "Freddy Fazbear's Pizzaria!". Desperate to look after his sister and look good in an upcoming custody battle, Mike takes the job, and there may be more to this place than meets the eye...

See what I did there? Explaining the plot succinctly and simply?
Fuck you Scott Cawthon. There are a myriad of problems in this capstone to a juggernaut of pop cultural growth, turning more and more benign every single day, but they can be boiled down, in this instance, to this:
I don't think Scott Cawthon can write his own name, let alone a fucking story.
You'd think that this would be easy to achieve (after all: "Willy's Wonderland" is great, and did this with about a tenth of the budget! Watch that movie!): scary robots, old theme park, run for your life. Instead the movie piles lore upon lore upon development upon plot point upon twist: like the backwash of a story outline created by a community of 9 year olds who read the synopses of spooky movies in a foreign language badly translated, force-fed to you by a guy who really knows far too much and gets far too angry about "Star Wars" lore. It's unsfferable.
One moment it's our hero struggling to overcome the trauma of a kidnapping in his youth; then it's an attempt at kitchen sink drama as he tries to make enough money to win custody of his sister (Piper Rubio), undercut by a comically Pantomime villain performance by Mary Stuart Wilson as an evil aunt. Then it's a talentless hack's take on "Doctor Sleep" with dream children, spirit guides, Faustian deals and an evil child murderer demon rabbit man who may be supernatural, but maybe not, but probably is. THEN the it becomes the joys of found family, rediscovering joy and love, and the animatronics are not evil really, only they are, only not really, only they're misunderstood!
It's exhausting.
It's like Scott Cawthon is force feeding you his 90,000 page fan fiction rewrite and lore crossover of "The Funhouse".
Rather fitting for a man with views on bodily autonomy like his...
There is no plot, only lore, and the lore is all terrible.
Then it is delivered like a Mormon comedy night: scenes are best described as awkward, jittering stop start nightmares with broad "comedic" moments and dialogue clearly not written by a person who ahs interacted with a single human being in their life. Thus we get Hutcherson trying his best, but nobody quite knowing how to play the material, and thus all floundering. A particular "standout" is Elizabeth Lail as a frustratingly weird, evasive and off-putting police officer who is almost line for line Deputy Winston from "Cabin Fever", but the spitting image of Elizabeth Holmes. It is genuinely one of the worst performances I have seen in recent memory.
Matthew Lillard, with his 2 scenes, sort of knows how to play it, but again his awkward weird energy never really sticks to anything, like pudding with velcro, and it is surrounded by bizarre intercut top down shots of his coffee mug or Dutch angles.
The movie's genuinely alarming in how terribly it is written, I cannot state this enough. If you sit down and just listen to the words being stated by the characters, and note them down, you'll find fucking beat poetry nonsense.
On top of it all, scenes simply end and judder on without warning or reason, as if rushing to get to the good parts, but forgetting to put them in.
The film is simultaneously anemic and padded: it is a Neutron star of awfulness attempting to collapse in on itself and its inconsistencies and inanity, but instead is kept alive in a harrowing anti-life, its body just a prop for the festering seed of terror growing within it:
much like what Scott Cawthon wants to do to women...
There is no way I can oversell the writing in this. If I attempted to write this poorly on purpose, I would fail. Performance art designed to parody and subvert the ideas of Homer and Joseph Campbell would not capture a tenth of the ludicrousness. It matches "Final Fantasy 13" for how dire its plotting is. Its tone is akin to splicing snippets of "My Cousin Vinny" into the runtime of "Bull".
I have seen toilet graffiti make more sense: "Sharon Sucks Cocks" at least has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and raises questions: whose cocks? Why? To what purpose?
I wish this sucked cocks, then at least it would be less homophobic than its creator.
Instead it sucks so much ass it should begin an irrigation practice.