Where I watched It: Peacock
English Audio Description?: Yes
From the perspective of someone who did not play the video games, I always assumed they were jump scare based games. You would have no idea of that after watching this movie. There are a few attempts, but they are all fake out jump scares, which often makes it even worse. Not to mention, the PG-13 rating leads to a lot of off-screen deaths. This made a ton of money at the box office, and I’m sure a sequel is on the way, but this first film didn’t build up enough goodwill to warrant a franchise.
josh Hutcherson plays a young man who has custody of his younger sister, and needs a job to pay the rent. He has an aunt that would love to be collecting government checks for taking care of her niece, and is always planning some nefarious things, but mostly Hutcherson is haunted by his past, and how he once had a little brother who was kidnapped and never heard from again. It destroyed his family, and now he’s left taking care of his sister, who likes coloring. A lot.
He goes to Matthew Lillard and asks for a job, which ends up being a security guard at a Chucky Cheese type establishment that has since closed its doors, but still requires a security guard to keep out vandals. That is when Hutcherson’s past starts to blend with animatronic animals who are alive inside the establishment, and it just keeps getting worse and weirder. There’s not a lot of death, barely anything that constitutes gore, but lots of disturbing thematic material as child abduction is the most prominent theme in the film, and things do not work out well for these kids. Not since The Lovely Bones have we been so mortified.
Again, maybe this is the game. but it feels like if Mortal Kombat was all about character building and backstory, and maybe once or twice there was an actual fight. I mean, you could do that, but i feel like that’s not what that film should look like.
The cast is mostly doing what they can with the very little the script offers them. It’s like being offfered a role in your church’s production of a show, but you know everyone who auditioned was cast even if they couldn’t act, because the church wants to make everyone happy so you just make due. You just try to bring whatever you can.
The audio description failed me on size relativity, as I was never really sure just how big the animatronic characters were, as sometimes they seem small, in what they would be doing, and other times, fucking huge. One animatronic is able to fit a person in its mouth, before chomping down and biting them in half. That’s a big dude. How he fits through doorways baffles me.
So, while I can’t give this film any props, there was something about the attempt to give this random horror film a rich backstory that impressed me. It was a bit too much backstory in terms of the ratio of horror to flashbacks, but it helped make this more than just a silly pile of nonsense, and it could have been that.
Any future iteration of this has to remember how silly it is, and have more fun with itself. This wasn’t great.
Final Grade: C-
