‘Five Nights At Freddy’s 2’ Movie Review: Mediocre Gateway-Horror Sequel Is No ‘Gremlins 2’
Photo from Universal Pictures
From Jeremy Kibler
Contrary to the wild popularity of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games, 2023’s big-screen adaptation didn’t earn quite as many fans. While murderous Chuck E. Cheese-y animatronics weren’t exactly going to have audiences screaming out of the theater, the PG-13 Blumhouse production worked well enough as an impish, creepily designed gateway horror movie for the kiddos. With far less blood than the coincidentally similar The Banana Splits Movie and Nicolas Cage-starrer Willy’s Wonderland, Five Nights at Freddy’s was like their Gremlins (which, yes, is always going to be a hard bar to clear). Blumhouse already took a gamble with two sequels to successful properties this year (M3GAN 2.0 and The Black Phone 2), and both had a hard time justifying their existence. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 had a little more potential, but this is a sequel of needlessly overplotted, underwhelming mediocrity.
Now, if you recall, the killer animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza were possessed by the child victims of serial killer William Afton (Matthew Lillard). This sequel picks back up over a year with the survivors of the last movie, including security guard Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), his 11-year-old sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who also turned out to be the daughter of William Afton. Mike and Vanessa try to act upon their romantic chemistry, but she still has too much PTSD from her father. Meanwhile, Abby really misses Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy—her only friends—while brother and guardian Mike fake-promises that he’ll get to fixing them one day. Once another set of animatronics are awakened inside the permanently closed flagship location (which doesn’t seem to be too far from the one from the first movie), another child spirit from 1982 has vengeful plans.
Director Emma Tammi returns and writer/game creator Scott Cawton now gets sole screenwriting credit this time, and the script is kind of a mess. In continuing whatever lore the video games have to offer, the movie grows more overstuffed and convoluted. By the anticlimactic conclusion, it seems the entire story is a means to an end, setting up for a third installment. And, for a movie that wants us to care so deeply about the surviving characters and their relationships, there really isn’t much to the main trio. Abby misses her “friends,” Mike is just trying to move forward, and Vanessa is trying to live a normal life again, too. The emotional stakes just aren’t there.
The cast is so earnest and somehow able to take this material deadly seriously, but they seem to be just going through the motions as stupid horror-movie pawns written with contrived character motivations as the plot requires. Piper Rubio is still untested here and forced to carry some of the emotional beats, which just feel like treacly kid-actor theatrics. Wayne Knight is at least amusing as the most unreasonable science teacher, Mr. Berg, who kicks Abby out of the robotics fair and gets what’s coming to him (not unlike Dennis Nedry). It was fun seeing Matthew Lillard get the chance to find his inner Stu Macher again (and he might earn the creepiest moments, returning here for a nightmare sequence). While Scream fans will also be delighted to see Skeet Ulrich in a supporting role, there’s nothing to get excited about, unless his part as a grieving parent to a key character gets expanded for next time.
This is pretty much the same movie as last time, only more poorly paced. Instead of a trio of robbers breaking into the abandoned pizzeria and making dumb decisions, it’s a trio of ghost-hunting YouTubers who break into the first location and make dumb decisions. Here, two of them at least are played by Teo Briones (Final Destination: Bloodlines, TV’s Chucky) and Mckenna Grace. The biggest difference here is a new foe in the form of The Marionette. That this kabuki-influenced antagonist exists in the games is beside the point; it stands out in the wrong way, coming off unquestionably unsettling and threatening to never once feel like a piece with Freddy and the gang that would attract kids having a pizza party.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 may have a few more scares than its predecessor, and even for a PG-13 horror movie, the terror feels more suggestive than corner-cutting. It still offers the admirably practical puppetry for Freddy and Co., courtesy of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, but one wishes the movie serving them was more inspired. There was a playfully twisted appeal to the first movie that comes through on occasion here. Hardcore fans of the source material will undoubtedly catch all of the Easter eggs that will go right over the heads of those who rarely pick up a game controller, and everyone else is better off spending five days elsewhere.
Rating: 2/5
Five Nights at Freddy’s is currently in theaters.
