Not scary, but overlong and overly reliant on CGI.

Rating: 5/10 (13 September 2019)

The movie starts out well, but quickly bogs down in disjointed scenes following the individual characters having an encounter with the monster and getting scared, in between unnecessary flashbacks to them getting scared by the monster in their childhoods.
After around two hours of this, where you're left pondering the meaning of life and wondering if the plot will ever go anywhere, the story finally picks up for the CGI heavy third act monster hunt, that really wouldn't feel out of place in an episode of Doctor Who.
If this movie were actually scary or unpredictable it would be one thing, but the plot beats are hugely predictable and because of the overuse of CGI nothing fells particularly scary. The film has a lot on jump scares, but they're telegraphed a mile away and you can literally count the seconds on your fingers when things go quiet before something scary happens. To compensate for the lack of real psychological horror, the film instead goes for shock value by amping up the gore.
On the plus side, the actors do well with what they're given, you do invest in the characters, and the movie is technically well made. But at nearly 3 hours it's just too long, and a lot of unnecessary scenes could have been cut without detriment. If an hour were trimmed, nothing would have been lost and it would immediately be transformed into a tighter, better movie.
At the end of the movie we're shown a street with a cinema advertising Nightmare on Elm Street 5, which shows that someone making this had a sense of humour because, while admittedly never as bad as the worst, this movie feels a lot like a modern incarnation of a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel.