As with its predecessor, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has a fundamental problem: animatronic pizza parlor animals are weird and creepy but not actually frightening.
Moreover, it shares with its 2023 ancestor a crippling case of illogicality—an issue which proves more troublesome this time around, since Emma Tammi’s sequel (December 5, in theaters) attempts to expand the mythology of the video game-based franchise. Doubling its killer-robot cast and diving deep into the source of their malevolence, it’s a follow-up that has enough PG-13 mayhem and cutesy Easter eggs to satisfy the fanboy faithful. Yet when it comes to scares, it can’t even deliver the, ahem, bear necessities.
Once again directed by Tammi and written by game creator Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 provides insight into the origins of its animatronic mascots’ evil by flashing back to 1982. There, young Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie) sits eagerly on the floor of the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza location (which boasts a river boat ride, among other novel gimmicks) waiting for the arrival—out of a trap door in the stage—of star attraction Marionette, a puppetmaster ‘bot that resembles No-Face from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
Poor Charlotte cares more about Marionette than the kids who are also attending that evening’s birthday party, and when she spots a giant yellow rabbit (whom we know is Matthew Lillard’s child-killing William Afton) snatch a boy and bring him into the back, she begs the restaurant’s adults to help. They don’t, so she attempts to be a hero and, for her bravery, winds up murdered.
This scandal is the reason this Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza outlet closed, although we’re meant to believe that this didn’t stop the chain from opening additional outposts, including the one featured in the first Five Nights at Freddy’s.
If this seems implausible, it’s no more so than the fact that Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his 11-year-old sister Abby (Piper Rubio) are unaware of the original pizza joint’s existence. Abby misses her animatronic pals Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy—or, rather, the dead-kid ghosts which inhabited them—whom she continues to call her friends, much to Mike’s chagrin. At the same time, Abby is building a mini-Chica to showcase at her middle school’s annual science fair, this despite her teacher’s (Wayne Knight) unreasonably mean efforts to have her skip the contest by telling her that she’ll just embarrass herself.
As Mike deals with Abby’s ghost obsession, he simultaneously goes on a date with local cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who’s now the one having bad dreams about deceased relatives. In this case, that would be her homicidal madman pops, who visits her in her sleep, taunting her, “You shall always be mine.”
Lillard’s bunny-costumed psycho is the most visually chilling sight in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, so naturally, Tammi barely spotlights him, instead opting to concentrate on Marionette, whom a trio of TV spook hunters (led by Mckenna Grace’s Lisa) run afoul of in the old restaurant, freeing her from captivity.
Marionette is possessed by the spirit of Charlotte, who remains super angry about her demise, and before long, she’s luring Abby to the restaurant by communicating with her via a Faztalker toy—even though Charlotte, who has zero connection to the prior film’s specters, should have no clue about Abby.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 need not be narratively airtight but Cawthon’s script is full of holes so big, its gigantic mecha-villains could stomp right through them. Marionette can wirelessly control her Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica (who have slightly updated appearances) and she wants to escape her confines with them in order to wreak havoc on the grown-ups who years earlier ignored her warnings.
Luckily for her, a Fazfest celebration—born from the town’s renewed fascination with the property, thanks to last film’s horrific events—gives her minions the perfect opportunity to move about without drawing undue attention to themselves (people just think they’re awesome costumes!). First, however, she must disable the “perimeter lock” that restricts her from leaving the premises, and to do this, she sets about using Mike and Vanessa to her advantage.
Mike’s race to track the escaped automatons on a 1990s-era computer as animatronics stalk him in a doorless room is Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 most obvious stab at channeling the games’ particular brand of jump-scare horror. Unfortunately, when it comes to startling or surprising, Tammi doesn’t have a single creative idea, and in the most depressing example of the proceedings’ unimaginativeness, she has Chica repeat a bad murder-related joke (she wants to see what’s going on inside her prey’s heads, har har).
Freddy and company look good but they move at such a lumbering pace that it’s downright laughable that they get their hands on anyone, and as for moving in and out of tight spaces (a cab door, a house’s window), well, let’s just say that the director uses careful edits to skirt past her action’s obvious logistical obstacles.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 promises a reunion between Scream mates Lillard and Skeet Ulrich, only to squander this opportunity by casting the latter as Charlotte’s dad Henry, whose sole purpose is to give Mike a deus ex machina means of deactivating his crazed dead daughter.
Tammi and Cawthon keep their tale moving by having characters refuse to discuss the urgent circumstances at hand, most notably with regards to Vanessa, who’s a fount of secrets that, had they been shared, would have cut off everyone’s problems at the pass. The director and writer then resolve their silly situations with plot cheats, slaughtering any potential terror before it’s born.
As the most profitable production in Blumhouse’s 25-year history, Five Nights at Freddy’s was destined to spawn a part two, and regardless of this series entry’s dullness, it strives in its closing moments to lay the groundwork for additional chapters.
Even those teases, alas, feel like watered-down copy-and-paste gestures. It’s easy to dismiss Tammi’s films as training-wheels horror designed to whet the appetite of young audiences, turning them onto the pleasures of big-screen things that go bump in the night. Budding cine-gorehounds, however, deserve better than this fright-free mush, whose sole imperative appears to be boring its audience to death.
