THE BEAR MINIMUM

In theaters this weekend:

Five Nights at Freddy's--The Freddy's in question is Freddy Fazbear's, a defunct and long-shuttered pizza joint and game arcade of the Chuck E. Cheese or Peter Piper sort. Our down-on-his-luck hero Mike (Josh Hutcherson) accepts a job as a third-shift security guard there. Before long, he finds that the gone-to-seed animatronic animal characters featured in the place may still have some murderous life in them.

This chiller is based on a popular 2014 video game that has given rise to a series of sequel games, novels and other spin-offs. I've never played the games or read the books, so I can't remotely say if the movie is faithful to its source material, or if it should be.

On its own terms, it's okay at best. Like Cocaine Bear from earlier this year, it has a nice '80s throwback flavor in its look, editing and music. Director Emma Tammi manages a few amusingly staged sequences, and Freddy and the other animal characters, products of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, have the repellent horror of deliberate, calculated cuteness gone decrepit. They're legitimate additions to the stable of Universal Monsters.

But the script, by several hands including Tammi and game creator Scott Cawthon, feels overcomplicated. The premise, right down to the title, would seem to suggest a simple approach: A guy stuck in a bummer job, alone in a creepy setting, finds things getting creepier and creepier and more and more perilous every night, until at last he knows he's not imagining it; the cartoony animal robots really are trying to kill him. Five acts of rising tension.

Instead, Mike is given flashbacks concerning a family tragedy which he's still trying to solve via dream therapy--which means sleeping on the job--as well as a little sister (Piper Rubio) he's trying to keep custody of. This backstory is genuinely poignant and disturbing, to the point that it makes the overt spookhouse horror stuff seem trivial and unfrightening. It's like a Goosebumps movie was mixed with a grim Dateline NBC episode.

The smallish cast is capable; Rubio is a sweet presence as the sister and Matthew Lillard gets some laughs as the guy who offers Mike the job. It should be said that the former child and teen actor Hutcherson (from the Hunger Games flicks and The Kids Are All Right) shows impressive chops in this grown-up lead. He brings Mike an understated but believable aura of lifelong anguish. For me, again, he was too potent for the fun, silly shocker that this should have been.

CURVE APPEAL

Having thrown a curve himself last month at the Republican National Convention—your own politics will probably determine whether or not you think he threw it for a strike—Clint Eastwood stays in the stands in Trouble with the Curve. But this time, the stands are where the action is. Both the speech and the movie make the same point, however—that Clint isn’t a kid anymore.

Clint plays Gus Lobel, a scout for the Atlanta Braves, veteran of decades of sitting in the stands with a notebook at high school games. Never exactly a ray of sunshine, Gus has been turned by old age into a snarling coot. His anger is understandable—it’s hard to pee in the mornings, and he needs a magnifying glass to read the paper. He can’t use a computer or any of the new statistical methods for evaluating players. But his real problem, professionally speaking, is the macular degeneration that’s placed a blurry horizontal band across the middle of his vision—right through his view of the strike zone.

A longtime widower, Gus has an emotionally distant relationship with his daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), an overachieving lawyer. An odious young whippersnapper (Matthew Lillard) in the Braves front office wants the GM (Robert Patrick) to get rid of Gus, whose contract is nearly up anyway, so Mickey risks losing a partnership at her firm to join Gus in rural North Carolina, and be his eyes as he scouts a slugging prospect.

While she’s there, Mickey—she’s named for her father’s favorite player—meets a former pitcher (Justin Timberlake) trying to carve out a post-playing niche for himself in baseball after washing out early. Guess what happens between them.

Except for an odd bit of backstory involving a horse, there’s really nothing unpredictable in Trouble with the Curve, either dramatically or visually—the plot’s resolution has, almost, a fairy-tale inevitability. The director is Eastwood’s longtime producer and assistant director Robert Lorenz, making his feature debut, but the style is very much the same as Eastwood’s—straightforward, unadorned narrative, unfolded at a leisurely pace. The dialogue, by Randy Brown, is likewise functional.

The good news is that the picture is still enjoyable and relaxing, thanks to the acting. Eastwood’s Do Not Go Gentle act seems effortless. His timing and his iconic, narrow-eyed expression make his spitting anger funny, and he has a convincing rapport with Adams and Timberlake, and especially with John Goodman, excellent as his boss and defender.

The supporting cast is full of old pros—Ed Lauter, Bob Gunton, Jack Gilpin, George Wyner, Raymond Anthony Thomas and even Chelcie Ross, who’s become a sort of sports-movie good luck charm, having appeared in Major League, Hoosiers and Rudy. These guys reinforce the movie’s point that while getting old is a drag, it doesn’t necessarily make you useless.

I must warn you, from here on I’m going to unload all the baseball metaphors I want. So: unlike the elegant, quietly intriguing Moneyball, released around this time last year, Trouble with the Curve isn’t a grand slam, or even a homer. Eastwood and company play small ball; they methodically get on, get over, get home. And at the end of nine, Clint puts another one in his lengthy win column.