I’m sorry, what’s supposed to be the appeal of Five Nights at Freddy’s again? The long-running horror video game franchise won its share of fans by having players get stalked by animatronic Chuck C. Cheese extras. That’s fine if you’re at home playing on a console. In practice on the movie screen, they are torturously slow and wildly unscary. The same goes for the films themselves, and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 somehow manages to be even more ponderous and weak than before.
Pretty much the entire cast returns from the previous film. Josh Hutcherson is back as Mike, with Piper Rubio as his much-younger sister Abby, and Elizabeth Lail as police officer Vanessa. The sequel delves further into Vanessa’s troubled past. We already know that her father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard, also back), ran a Chuck E. Cheese-style pizza joint where he killed kids and held their souls captive in the animatronic creatures. Now, Vanessa is still haunted by what she learned, while Abby is eager to be reunited with the “friends” she made during the previous film, animatronics such as Chica and Freddy Fazbear.
A prequel sequence introduces the Marionette, another deadly animatronic from the original Freddy Fazbear’s pizza joint. This location has a few more bells and whistles than the lame chain restaurant from the first movie. A river ride proves mildly chilling, especially when dozens of mini animatronics are lurking just beneath the surface. But for the most part, the locations are interchangeable and don’t add much to the atmosphere. A subplot involving a Ghost Hunters-style TV show crew (led by McKenna Grace, ironically of the Ghostbusters franchise) is a waste of time, other than to establish the tame PG-13 kills that will be on display.
Once again written by franchise creator Scott Cawthorn and directed by Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has all of the problems that plagued the first movie. It’s understandable that nothing has been improved upon because that movie was a day-and-date box office smash. However, it’s still incredibly slow, dull, and overloaded with expository dialogue. There’s more explaining than actual animatronic threats of death, which don’t really get going until the final minutes of the film. And even then, they are nondescript and forgettable.
Cawthorn writes his characters as if he’s fulfilling an obligation to a sequel. Much of the time, he’s making overt references to much better horrors, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Jurassic Park (Wayne Knight plays another dickhead we want to see killed), and oddly enough, Scream, boasting two veterans in Lillard and Skeet Ulrich. However, he doesn’t use them together at all. What was the thought process around that? Nods to the games abound, including a sequence when Mike sits at a security console attempting to shut off the powerful wifi. This being set in the year 2002, you can imagine how slow and painful that process was. Mike can also occasionally confuse the animatronics by donning one of their masks.
But if you don’t care about game Easter Eggs or the franchise lore, you won’t care about Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. I’d argue that the filmmakers don’t care that much about the movie, either, which is coasting by on the success of its crappy predecessor. The cliffhanger ending and tease of a third movie feels like a threat more than a promise of future quality. Hopefully, someone will demolish all of the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza joints before that can happen.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 hits theaters December 5th.
