Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Review: FNAF Fans Deserve Better Horror Movies
Welcome back to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 continues the story of Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) after escaping the abandoned pizzeria where the animatronics come to life with a thirst for blood. This movie brings in more animatronics, more chaos, and not nearly enough quality to sustain this franchise. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is yet another disappointing entry into a series that has no idea how to effectively scare an audience.
At New York Comic Con this year, I asked director Emma Tammi if she had listened to any of the critics who were unsatisfied with the first film. Her response was that she mainly wanted to appeal to the dedicated FNAF fan base, not the movie critics, deeming it “an impossible endeavor to try to satisfy them.” And therein lies our problem: this movie doesn’t care to improve on anything from the first movie. It’s not impossible to satisfy critics, even with video game movies. From Pokémon: Detective Pikachu to the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, it’s been well-documented that critics are open to liking video game movies with dedicated fanbases.
And here, we have a horror premise that could be both massively entertaining and terrifying. But this sequel manages to be neither. It shouldn’t be too challenging to both entertain the longtime fans of Five Nights at Freddy’s and also make a movie good enough for critics to enjoy. However, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a movie that solely does the former. Fans of the games will be overjoyed by how beautifully these animatronics are brought to life and all the visual and musical references to a series they’ve loved for years. Critics like me? We just want a good horror movie. And we’re not getting that here.
Yep, this movie’s getting the “I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed” approach. Do fans deserve to have their beloved game adapted to the big screen with fun easter eggs and lore? Absolutely. But fans also deserve great movies, and I’d be lying if I said that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is the best possible version of what we could get from a movie adaptation of this terrifying game. Rather than a great movie, this is a film loaded with the most predictable, lazy jump scares you can imagine.
The opening scene is set in the ’80s, when business was booming at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. We’re introduced to a young girl named Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie) who sees a child get abducted into the back room. She runs around, screaming and desperate for an adult to help, but all of them brush her off. The writing here is frustratingly bad. Every screenplay wants to avoid having too many plot conveniences, but this scene has too many plot inconveniences, which is a crime of equal punishment. I believe that one adult would be rude and dismissive of a child, clearly horrified about what happened to a kid, but two or three? You’ve lost me.
Things seem to be going in the right direction when the scene ends with a pretty violent, dark event. But the PG-13 rating holds this sequel back just like it held back its predecessor. They’re so limited in the amount of blood they can show that most of the kills happen offscreen. Gore is always implied, but in a franchise where animatronic animals come to life and murder people, there’s a significant lack of creativity in just how violent these movies can get. It’s a pitfall of keeping the teenage demographic that loves the games and wanting a place for them in the movie theater. It’s a noble, understandable sacrifice, but a disappointing one.
There’s some fun to be had here and there. Wayne Knight is in this movie! This guy was everywhere in the ’90s, from Seinfeld to Jurassic Park to Space Jam. He’s back, and he’s in his element that we’ve sorely missed: playing a pathetic, hateable teacher that nobody likes. The writing for him can also be a bit much. He’s written less like a person and more like a villainous archetype designed for us to root for him to face his demise at the hands of an animatronic.
Another bit of inspired casting is Freddy Carter as a security guard at another Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. From the second he shows up on screen, he has the most ominous presence ever. You can’t trust him any more than you can trust his haunting eyebrows. I do wish the film had kept its cards a bit closer to its chest with this character, just like I wish the character had more screen time than he ended up having, especially before the final act.
One of the best sequences in the film is when a group of paranormal investigators led by Lisa (played by McKenna Grace, who is excellent in this movie) gets hunted down by animatronics. This is where the movie feels most like a fun video game. But for the most part, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has little to offer in the scares department. Tammi brings zero style or flair to these jump scares. She simply cuts to an animatronic and puts a loud sound over it. This is copied and pasted over and over again. Every time. We just cut to something with a loud sound.
It’s like playing a video game with someone who keeps spamming the same move. At some point, you’re getting predictable, and the fun is lost. A good portion of this movie is just scene after scene of cheap, uninspired jump scares. There’s no suspense. There’s no tension. Animatronics just appear with a loud noise. You can’t get much lazier than this. Every single filmmaking choice is mind-numbingly predictable. For example, let’s say a character opens a fridge door, obscuring the room behind it. What do you think is going to happen when they close the fridge door? Guess. Take a guess. I’m here all night. All five nights, actually.
A fun tidbit that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has to offer is that it features Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard in the cast, who most notably shared the screen in the 1996 slasher Scream. This movie is a bit of a reunion for them, even though they don’t directly interact. But that had me thinking about the Scream franchise, another series of horror movies that has some fun with its villains. Those movies are so much better. The 2022 Scream movie quite literally has a scene where a character opens a fridge door and closes it, and nothing appears behind the door. That film had the self-awareness to play with its audience like that. But this movie just gives us every jump scare precisely when we expect it.
Let’s take an example from Scream 2. One of the best scenes is where Ghostface is in the driver’s seat of a crashed car, unconscious, and two characters in the backseat need to quickly and quietly crawl over him through the window to get out of the car, while Ghostface could wake up at any moment. That’s the kind of nail-biting tension this movie needed! There’s a scene where Mike is at a computer, and he’s doing something very important. How great would this scene have been if he were anxiously doing his task while animatronics get closer and closer to the room he’s in, and we cut back and forth between them? That would be amazing! But no, he’s doing his task, and then we cut to the doorway (BOOM!) and see an animatronic standing there. Over and over. Rinse and repeat.
The writing is also subpar. One of the subplots in this film surrounds 11-year-old Abby wanting to see her animatronic friends again. But there’s a scene earlier in the movie where a classmate on the school bus invites her to eat lunch with his friends. Another classmate on the bus is repulsed by her detailed recount of the events of the first movie, but Abby clearly isn’t having a hard time connecting with some of her peers. Why is she so dedicated to seeing the animatronics again? In the first film, she was friends with the animatronics for about a day. And one of them quite literally tried to murder her. I do not buy for a second that she now spends every waking minute of every day wanting to hang out with them again.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 also features Mike going on what seems like a date with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). The movie doesn’t do nearly enough with their relationship. There’s a date, then a minor conflict, and then they’re caught up in survival mode during the final act. The writing doesn’t push anything far enough because it’s so focused on all the animatronics.
Credit where credit’s due—the villain this time around has a wonderful design that lends to effectively creepy imagery. The animatronics are brought to life practically, and they look excellent. They look exactly like how you’d want them to look in real life. Fans will get lots of what they’re hoping for. But make no mistake—these are bad movies. It tries scaring you by having a character put their hand on someone’s shoulder. It tries scaring you by having two children jump out of a classroom and surprise you. The ending leaves so much unresolved that it made me want to see a third movie even less.
To the FNAF fans who have somehow made it to the end of this review: I’m sure you’re going to see this movie anyway. I hope you have a good time, but you deserve a much better movie than this.
SCORE: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to “Poor.” The negatives outweigh the positive aspects, making it a struggle to get through.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 review.
Source: Comingsoon.net