Nicolas Cage beats the stuffing out of some possessed animatronics in Willy’s Wonderland, a goofball new thriller inspired by the popular video game Five Nights at Freddy’s that doesn’t offer much but delivers on its central promise. Half-delivers, anyway.
Cage is a lot of fun as our hardened protagonist here, who doesn’t utter a single word through the entire film, and never delivers the much-anticipated Cage freakout scene despite encountering the spawn of Hell in a weasel costume. It’s a brave choice; a lesser film might have Cage screaming at these critters at every turn, but here he battles them with a quiet dignity. Ridiculous, yes, but Willy’s Wonderland is all the more amusing because of it.
Cage’s “Janitor” finds himself in the titular Willy’s Wonderland, a misbegotten Chuck E. Cheese-like children’s birthday venue, after a misplaced police spike strip in a sleepy Nevada town blows out all four tires on his Chevy Camaro. The local auto shop can repair it, but they don’t take cards and Cage’s character has no cash on hand.
So the usual deal is proffered by businessman Tex (Ric Reitz) and mechanic Jed (Chris Warner): work off the debt by spending the night cleaning up the local haunted amusement center, and the Camaro’ll be ready in the morning.
The animatronics don’t waste much time, and start attacking one-by-one as they make their way up to Willy Weasel. And despite a horror movie cold open, Cage is unfazed: he rips off the mechanical ostrich and gorilla heads without suffering more than a scratch, all while taking hourly breaks to enjoy an energy drink and a game of pinball.
And Cage’s Janitor really does a good job cleaning up the place. A five-minute restroom cleaning sequence is, no joke, one of the most satisfying sequences in the entire film on a very real and relatable level.
Now, this is the movie you come to see, and you get precisely half of it. Willy’s Wonderland is forty-five minutes of Cage vs. Demonic Toys. And that’s enough, if just barley.
The rest of Willy’s Wonderland is the “movie” the filmmakers think they need to include here to make sense of their ridiculous premise. And the more they explain, the less fun Willy’s Wonderland becomes.
And so while we’re not watching Cage beat up on the animatronics, we get the local Sheriff (Beth Grant) and the usual group of horror movie teen protagonists and what feels like a good half hour of exposition as they desperately try to justify this nonsense: a notorious serial killer, a family establishment, a deal with the devil, a town living in fear.
It’s all perfunctory distraction, and largely a waste of time, even if director Kevin Lewis keeps a grip on the style and tone of Willy’s Wonderland and never lets things get too serious. Through large stretches of the film, however, you might wonder why you’re still watching.
Additional gripe: one of the “animatronics” that gets the most screen time is an actress in a doll mask, no furry costume. It’s no secret that the other creatures are actors in suits, but this one really breaks the fourth wall and stands out against her co-stars.
But if the prospect of Nicolas Cage vs. Chuck E. Cheese was enough to bring you in, there’s enough of it on display here to satisfy. This isn’t a total success, and it isn’t a satisfying big screen spin on the genuinely terrifying survival horror of Five Nights at Freddy’s, but Willy’s Wonderland is stylish, goofy fun that delivers where it counts.
Czech actor and stuntman Jiří Staněk performed stunts for the movie, and appears onscreen as the titular Willy in flashback scenes.
