Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 jump-scares away whatever merits the first movie had, leaving us with a story that only diehard fans can enjoy.

But like the game monsters jumping out at you and ruining a run, this sequel scared away all the good will I had.

One year after the first movie, Mike (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games) is trying to move on from the events that nearly claimed the life of his sister Abby (Piper Rubio, For All Mankind). But Abby’s lingering friendship with the missing spirits of children who haunted the original Freddy Fazbear animatronics – yes, I still like the first film after typing that – draws her to the very first Freddy Fazbear’s, where she’s put in the crosshairs of a new supernatural threat. At the same time, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, You) is still coping with the trauma from her serial killer father (Matthew Lillard, Scream).

Here’s the thing about the first Five Night’s at Freddy’s: I reiterate that it’s best seen as a Stephen King-styled ghost story. It mainly revolves around a small group of sympathetic characters, and their plight is interwoven with supernatural elements that are kept just vague enough to be loosely interpreted. Its biggest weakness is that it doesn’t lean heavily enough into that uncanniness to mask how implausible a lot of it is. But Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 made the brilliant decision to double down on that problem at the cost of what little investment you may have had for these stupid, stupid people.

A lot of problems are represented by how the film handles Abby. Her insistence on getting back to her “friends,” the dead children who almost killed her, could have been played up as what it is: disturbing. Maybe the ghosts have a psychic, hypnotic bond that draws her in like the house in The Haunting of Hill House, and maybe her past experiences have made her such an outcast at school that the bond is amplified. But the film plays the friendship completely straight and uplifting, so she looks like the kind of idiotic kid who’d die early in this type of movie. Not that Mike’s any better, blatantly ignoring the warning signs that should have let this movie end an hour earlier.

That’s the biggest downfall of these movies: they don’t realize how ridiculous the plots are with a “grounded” tone. Every creative choice has the outline of something really scary, but when the space within those outlines is only one-third filled, it’s made all the more apparent how many moments don’t make a lick of sense or are just trying to make other moments happen. Whether it’s characters withholding obviously important info, motivations and instincts not lining up, or even the basic logistics of how or why freakish events happen, you can see the scotch tape at the seams even more than the already iffy first film.

Believe it or not, though, I can forgive a lot of that nonsense if I at least give a damn about what’s going on. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 laughs in the face of that and refuses to explore the siblings’ healing relationship past the first act, or Vanessa battling her inner demons beyond one dream sequence, or what should be her twisted connection to the new ghostly danger in town. Or even how some diabolical spell is clearly making the adults in the film’s cold open act so laughably callous and dumb- oh nope, that’s just how they are because the plot and themes demand it. Whatever it takes to get us to the toothless PG-13 filler violence.

Yeah, for all the people who complained about the lack of animatronic kills in the first movie, this is what your wish gets you: constant jump-scares that take over the story and don’t even make sense. Giant metallic animatronics practically shake the ground when they walk, but they’re somehow standing right behind people without getting noticed. Sure, and this movie totally makes sense to come out around Christmas and not Halloween. The games’ appeal is that they contain bare-minimum plots to get you to the thrills, but you can dig deeper and find various lore that, whether it makes sense or not, is just a bonus. This is acceptable because they’re games.

This movie and the recent Wicked: For Good both fail to learn the same lesson: adaptations are not automatically good by being faithful to their source material. Especially when the source material has blatant problems that any decent storyteller would change to serve more than just a preestablished fanbase. After all, it’s not like this is a poorly made movie. It still has a good deal of cinematic flair, and the tension before the bad jump-scares is still effective. There are many creative reveals of killers that get a nice little spine-tingling reaction, and I give major props for still using… well, props. As in, real animatronics in real, physically built set pieces that translate the games’ iconography very well.

Even then, I still remember the locations from the first film more. Everything there felt more lived-in and grander, maybe because of how much more time is spent in its Freddy Fazbear location. The climax in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a step down too, especially with an ending that shamelessly sets up a sequel while ripping off the final shot of The Evil Dead. Even the acting takes a hit. Piper Rubio unfortunately gives a very stiff performance, but it’s not like the adults’ work is anything special either. The film’s biggest sin, though? It has Skeet Ulrich (Scream) and does nothing with him. The fact that both original Ghostface killers are here is barely a footnote.

But really, if you don’t have years of love for this franchise, the whole movie might as well be a footnote. I started the review with disappointed dad energy, but my irritations just keep piling up the more I think about why this movie doesn’t work. Maybe I just feel foolish for having ever thought these movies may somewhat know what they’re doing. I’m sure this sequel will do the job for the many Five Nights at Freddy’s fans out there, but if you’re literally anyone else, I’d recommend you do what the characters in the film should’ve done: never go back to Freddy’s.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is now available to watch in U.S. theaters, in U.K. & Irish cinemas, and globally in theatres.