Freddy Fazbear and his animatronic friends break out of the pizzeria to cause havoc in the outside world.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Emma Tammi
Starring: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Wayne Knight, Mckenna Grace, Teo Briones
One of the surprise horror hits of recent years was the 2023 adaptation of cult video game Five Nights at Freddy's. After decades of trying, Hollywood has only recently found success with video game movies, with FNAF riding a wave that has included bigger hits such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros and Minecraft. Despite premiering on US streaming service Peacock on the same day as its theatrical release, FNAF made almost $300 million at the box office on a budget of $20 million. And it did all this in spite of largely negative reviews. It's no surprise that a sequel was quickly greenlit, but it's frustrating that the filmmakers have completely ignored the criticisms of the first movie.
The chief complaint was that FNAF failed to live up to its basic premise. The game sees the player occupy the role of a security guard in "Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria," as you battle animatronics that have come to life and turned homicidal. You would imagine a movie adaptation should essentially be Chopping Mall in a Chuck E. Cheese, and that's pretty much what we got with The Banana Splits Movie and Willy's Wonderland, two indie movies that beat FNAF to the punch as Hollywood dithered. But in the hands of director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Scott Cawthorn (creator of the video game), what we got was a stultifying mess of unnecessary subplots and backstory. It didn't help that the movie was so desperate to nail a family friendly rating that it skipped out on the expected gore.
This sequel stubbornly doubles down on everything that didn't work in the first movie. Handing the writing reins to Cawthorn appears a terrible mistake, as he seems more interested in developing his creation's lore than in delivering an entertaining movie. The main characters return. Mike (Josh Hutcherson), the security guard who discovered a serial killer (Matthew Lillard) had trapped the souls of a bunch of his child victims in Fazbear's animatronics, is attempting to move on with his life. But his kid sister Abby (Piper Rubio) wishes to be reunited with the animatronics, whom she considers her "friends." Meanwhile Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), the cop who aided Mike and discovered her father was the killer, is haunted by dreams of her evil dad.
This time a new animatronic villain is introduced in the form of "The Marionette," a blonde-haired, female-coded robot that is clearly a lazy attempt to cash in on the success of M3GAN, something M3GAN's own sequel couldn't even pull off. The elevator pitch here is that the animatronics escape the pizzeria and cause havoc in the outside world. Ok, that sounds like fun, right? Except it's not, because it doesn't actually happen until an hour into the movie and even then its potential for splatstick set-pieces is squandered by a combination of the PG rating, Tammi's inept direction and Cawthorn's disinterest in penning a fun horror movie.
As with the first movie, this sequel is bogged down in world-building and pointless subplots. There's a will-they-won't-they between Mike and Vanessa, but given how two full years have passed since the events of the first movie, surely one of them would have made a move by now? Abby is now 11 and yet still behaves like she's a toddler; it's impossible to buy into her wish to be reunited with the homicidal animatronics. Lillard's contract must have included a sequel clause, as there's no other reason for the extended dream sequence that sees him return here. He's joined here by fellow Scream alumni Skeet Ulrich, who is introduced in a manner that suggests the filmmakers are grossly over-estimating the popularity of Skeet Ulrich in 2025 (with his beard and middle-aged spread, it took me a few moments to even recognise him here).
Perhaps devotees of the games are getting something from this series that the rest of us are missing, but for casual horror fans this is just another example of cynical IP mining. The scariest thing here is the ending, which threatens a third movie. It's enough to turn you off pizza.
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is in UK/ROI cinemas from December 5th.
