Five Nights at Freddy's 2

by Mike McGranaghan

Let’s start out with something nice: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is marginally better than the original. Not a huge compliment, but a compliment nonetheless. A major complaint about the movie was that it took forever to get to the evil animatronic characters that are a mainstay of the same-named video game series. Correcting that was clearly a goal of the sequel, which takes a M3GAN 2.0 approach by turning the bad guys into good guys, introducing a new villain, and going full-tilt crazy with the story.

Things pick up shortly after the prior movie’s ending. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to create a stable life for little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) after the trauma they endured. He’s also pseudo-romancing cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). Trouble finds them again when online paranormal investigator Lisa (Mckenna Grace) and her team begin exploring the original Freddy Fazbear’s restaurant where a young girl tragically died in the early 1980s. She gets possessed by one of Freddy’s former animatronic cohorts, a marionette named Charlotte, and unleashes a bunch of deformed prototype mechanical creatures to do her bidding. Fortunately, Abby still has a connection to her “friends” – i.e. the slain children trapped inside Freddy, Chica, and the others who previously tried to kill her.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 aims to expand Freddy Fazbear’s world. Great amounts of time are spent establishing Charlotte’s backstory, how it ties into Vanessa’s serial killer father (Matthew Lillard), and setting up the eventual battle Mike and Abby will have with her. In a neat twist, Lillard’s Scream co-star Skeet Ulrich has a one-scene cameo as the deceased girl’s father, although he’s basically here to introduce a Chekhov’s Gun.

Some of this material is okay. Other stuff feels crammed in simply to provide opportunities for horror before the big blowout finale. A subplot concerning Abby’s snooty science teacher (Wayne Knight) is a perfect example. We know a gruesome murder is coming, so we wait impatiently as FNAF 2 goes through the empty motions of getting us there.

Like the first movie, the sequel has trouble generating real scares. Director Emma Tammi stages the horror sequences in a dull, unimaginative style. Lame jump scares are about as far as it goes. Precious little time is spent building suspense or creating an atmosphere that might raise viewers’ pulses. And once again, the desire to hit a PG-13 rating hampers the plot. The animatronics are supposed to be committing acts of hideous violence, but the camera always cuts away. PG-13 horror can definitely work, provided it has some of that necessary atmosphere, a quality that unfortunately eludes Tammi.

To be completely fair, the final 25 minutes offer several moments of unhinged madness as animatronics of all kinds run amok. I can’t honestly say it works as a resolution because the picture ends with a blatant cliffhanger set-up for a third installment. It sure isn’t boring, though. The action becomes amusingly wild. This is the point where you can tell the makers are trying to placate the game’s fanbase. Too bad there isn’t more substance leading up to this entertaining madness.

Then you get that cliffhanger, along with the obligatory mid-credits scene designed to tease the arrival of a familiar figure in Five Nights at Freddy’s 3. Nothing is fully resolved, and that fact makes it glaringly clear that this was made to be a commercially exploitable product above all else.

---