Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a continuation of the vacuous Universal/Blumhouse franchise adapted from Scott Cawthon’s popular series of video games and books. When it was released in 2023, Emma Tammi’s first Freddy’s movie surprised everyone with a massive $297 million worldwide gross despite scathing reviews. Far from taking any of those notices into account, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (now in cinemas) doubles down and commits a fatal franchise error.
Freddy’s 2 Has More Action and Even More Backstory
Tammi’s sequel ups the action and kill count of the original, but it gets so bogged down in an intricate, uninteresting backstory which renders the movie no fun at all. Cawthon penned the screenplay (he wrote the first film with Tammi and Seth Cuddleback), and just about everything here is either an Easter egg or laying track for a future installment. It’s impressive how little fun the filmmakers manage to render demonic toy robots.
Freddy’s 2 picks up one year after the horrific events of the first film. In that one, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria night security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) defeated his boss, child-murderer William Afton (Matthew Lillard, returning here briefly), with the help of his little sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), and love interest Vanessa (Elisabeth Lail), Atherton’s daughter and a local cop. In the process, they disconnected the evil robotic mascots, which are possessed by the spirits of Afton’s victims. Somehow, Mike and Vanessa managed to hide from Abby the sticky details about possession, and she pines to be reunited with her “friends.” When Abby is coaxed back to the pizzeria by Toy Chica (amusingly voiced by Megan Fox) and summarily forced to do the mascots’ evil bidding, Mike and Vanessa must face their fears and return to Freddy’s.
Sequel Takes No Lessons from the Original
If you were one of those burnt by the stationery nature of the first Freddy’s movie, you will not be rewarded for your open-hearted willingness to embrace the sequel. The experience of watching Freddy’s 2 is a rough one. Even with all of the backstory and lore, it feels stagnant and unmoving.
The Freddy’s movies have most in common with those early-2000s J-horror remakes; not because they’re scary or owe any particular debt to Japanese auteurs, but because they’re the most benign type of “scary” movies. They’re scary movies for people who’d rather not be watching scary movies.
To clear the air, the problem is not that the Freddy’s movies are aimed at an adolescent audience. There have been wonderful horror movies for teenagers and young kids, and Blumhouse proved with the M3GAN movies that you could do PG-13 horror without skimping on the brutality and gory punchlines. Five Nights at Freddy’s is just no fun at all; and worse, it’s seemingly put together without any care or goal except extracting every possible penny from its not insubstantial target audience. Rather than a clever adaptation of the source material, it’s a hastily compiled list of references and name drops. But judging from early reactions, this is exactly what most fans want. It concludes with an ostensible cliffhanger, but that would imply it carries a degree of resolution or makes some sense. Really, the movie just ends. It seems inevitable that part three will arrive shortly.
