The ghost-possessed family-restaurant animatronics of the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies lumber around with such heavy-footed gaucherie that it’s hard to figure out how they’re physically able to move from place to place as quickly as they’d need to for a proper killing spree. In what could be mistaken for a case of form following function, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 moves the exact same way. It’s so ostentatiously awkward that it constantly draws attention to its inept imitations of actions that other movies, even bad ones, intuitively understand – like making transitions between scenes or locations.
For example, when faced with the need to isolate a mean science teacher (Wayne Knight) so that he can be vengefully murdered by one of the aforementioned animatronics, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 bafflingly cuts to him walking down a school hallway (during a science fair that has inexplicably run far into a Saturday evening), having a cell-phone conversation about how he needs to visit his office to retrieve his keys. The keys themselves, the location of his office, and the unseen person on the other end of the phone have no meaning in the greater story, not even nominally. They’re just a jumble of elements that the film-makers grasp at, under the assumption that it will add up to something that looks and sounds like a movie should.
That this grasping is performed with a daft serenity, rather than sweaty panic, can probably be owed to the first Five Nights at Freddy’s becoming a massive youth-culture hit in 2023. This is the kind of sequel that assumes everything went swimmingly with its predecessor. Based on a beloved and lore-heavy video game series, the earlier film followed Mike (Josh Hutcherson), his confusingly decades-younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and local police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) as they uncovered the secrets of an abandoned Chuck E Cheese-style restaurant and its haunted mascots. One of those secrets: that Vanessa’s father William Afton (Matthew Lillard) killed local children and then controlled their souls as they inhabited the various animatronic creatures with names (and animal personas) like Freddy Fazbear, Chica and Foxy.
The sequel reveals more about Vanessa’s past, with a 1982-set prologue introducing a new animatronic character called Marionette, along with a new ghostly possessor to continue menacing our heroes. Abby actually misses the possessed creatures that befriended her in the first film, and who Mike has baselessly promised to recreate in some form. The Marionette takes advantage of Abby’s animatronic loyalty to lure her into another abandoned restaurant. Its extra features, like a water-tunnel ride, are hustled through without much thought; much of the story involves shuttling between several nondescript locations of indeterminate distance from each other. That shuttling includes the animatronics escaping their restaurant habitat and clanking around in the outside world, which provides more opportunities for returning director Emma Tammi to construct clever suspense sequences.
In keeping with the first film, these opportunities are repeatedly and firmly declined. One thrill-ride of a scene, presumably designed to further imitate gameplay, has Mike sitting at a computer console, clicking at random through a security system, hoping to find the powerful wifi system that will shut down the animatronics remotely. The movie is set in 2002, so it must explain with trademark elegance that this wifi happens to be unusually powerful. Sure, that makes sense; why wouldn’t a long-shuttered kids’ restaurant be on the cutting edge of tech? Game creator Scott Cawthon, here the sole credited screenwriter, has thought of everything, and also made sense of nothing.
This includes the movie’s bizarre attempts to synthesize some influences. Though the robot characters have an ‘80s aesthetic in an early-’00s setting, some other details suggest a desire to nod at ‘90s classics like Jurassic Park (where Knight is also satisfyingly killed by themed creatures) and Scream (where Lillard also plays a serial killer). Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 even goes so far as to cast both Lillard (whose character died in the first movie) and Skeet Ulrich (who most famously played Lillard’s co-conspirator in Scream), then doesn’t bother to give them a single shared scene. The movie’s new revenge hook of Marionette targeting neglectful parents, meanwhile, seems vaguely inspired by, well … saying A Nightmare on Elm Street would give it too much credit. Let’s say it’s inspired by an AI-generated summary of A Nightmare on Elm Street that fails to mention how that movie has indelibly scary imagery and rich themes involving adults passing their traumas onto children.
Those sorts of things don’t seem to interest Cawthon. By all evidence, he is singularly unqualified to write towards human experiences that aren’t marblemouthed attempts at references. He’s protecting a franchise, of which Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 positions itself as an installment, rather than a real movie. As such, it doesn’t bother with a proper ending – though the beginning and middle it provides suggest that this may not matter. Its shrug of a quasi-cliffhanger may not matter to its young target audience, either. Some of them, though, along with anyone else not inherently besotted with game iconography and YouTuber cameos, may start to wonder what it would be like to watch a real horror movie – or just one made with the comforts of baseline hackwork. Like a lot of movies, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has its own souvenir popcorn bucket. This may be the first one where the bucket is more entertaining than the feature.
