Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 Review: The Video Game Movie Sequel Limbos Under The Low Bar Set By The First Film

To put it plainly, director Emma Tammi’s Five Nights At Freddy’s is a bad movie, and experience has led me to have an instinctual wariness when it comes to sequels to bad movies that also happen to be extremely popular. I generally like to think of follow-up films as exciting opportunities for creatives, as all the groundwork is laid for potentially blue sky storytelling with the established world and characters… but the rub when it comes to bad movies is about expectation: if audiences were happy to tolerate the flaws of the predecessor, one can’t expect those problems to be rectified/addressed in the aim of the filmmakers to give movie-goers more of what they apparently want.

Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 has been flying red flags ever since it was first announced, and it crawls under the low bar that has been set for it. In broad strokes, it is wildly dull, with its only energy provided by its parade of telegraphed and repetitive jump scares. More significant, though, is just how incompetent it manages to be in its storytelling – in terms of both narrative flow and its character development.

Steamrolling through any limitations introduced in the previous movie’s third act twists, Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 begins with revelations that victims of serial killer William Afton (Matthew Lillard) weren’t limited to those we previously met. In an opening flashback set in 1982, we learn of another girl who was killed at the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza named Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie) who had a particular attachment to a wirelessly controlled animatronic character known as the Marionette and was a childhood friend of Ashton’s daughter Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). It’s as simple a path to the introduction of a new villain that the sequel could take, and it blithely skips down it.

Fast-forwarding 20 years, the movie then catches up with siblings Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and Abby (Piper Rubio) in the aftermath of their supernatural experience at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Beyond painting his living room and deciding whether or not he is dating Vanessa, Mike isn’t shown to be doing anything at all, and while Abby has found popularity and potential friends at school, she shirks them in favor of pining for her lost, homicidal haunted animatronic pals. They’re characters who remain terrifically hard to root for in their respective dullness and whininess, and yet the film forces you to do so as a trio of paranormal investigators (Mckenna Grace, Teo Briones, David Andrew Calvillo) wake Charlotte’s spirit in the Marionette in the original Freddy Fazbear's and she gets an unwitting Abbey to help unleash her rage.

For a film from a major studio film, it’s shocking how sloppy Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is.

I don’t use the word “sloppy” a lot when it comes to movies from major studios, as there are typically enough professionals in the room ensuring that features at least modestly functional, but it’s the adjective that springs to mind most boldly in collecting my thoughts about Five Nights At Freddy’s 2. Intelligent filmmaking would give Mike literally any direction, help us emotionally understand Abby’s desire to reunite with the animatronics, and not make preposterous decisions like having a character deliver the exact same pun in back-to-back scenes… and those are just a few examples from this cinematic train wreck.

Without getting into spoilers, plot threads are introduced and disposed at whim; scenes and settings are weirdly jumbled (it took me way too long to realize that there are two Freddy Fazbear's Pizza locations in play); introductions of new characters are haphazard at best (I hoped for far more and far better for genre veterans Mckenna Grace and Teo Briones), and its big “reveal” in the third act is perhaps the most unearned twist I’ve seen a film try to execute during my professional career as a critic. It is a mind-boggling mess.

An overdose of jump scares isn’t enough to break up the tedium of the Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 experience.

I can’t even say that it’s a “fun” mind-boggling mess, as all entertainment value is overshadowed by confusion, frustration, and most significantly, boredom. With the story being so chaotic and the characters so one dimensional/repellant, there is nothing for the audience to invest their attention in. What’s left is just clinging to the weak narrative threads and looking for the corner around which the next rote jump scare will be. And that gets tired very quickly.

With its PG-13 rating and knowing the core demographic of the source material, I recognize that Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is aimed at movie-goers younger than myself. And I will even say that I don’t have a universal hatred of the jump scare: used responsibly, they can be delightfully effective. But Emma Tammi and screenwriter Scott Cawthon seem to think that they are the only genre tools available to them beyond just-off-screen violence, and the shocks are empty. The design of the animatronics (while the puppeteering remains impressive) has lost any scare value following the first movie, and while there is potential in the slinky, creepy presentation of the Marionette, all it ever does is leap at the camera.

I’ll fully admit that the process of writing this review has felt akin to the experience of scolding a cinder block, as Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is most definitely what is colloquially known as “critic-proof.” But if you are an individual with anything resembling discerning taste reading this while on the fence about whether or not you should purchase a ticket, my recommendation would certainly be that you shouldn’t. It’s not worth the zeitgeist exploration nor the experience as a hate-watch, and after the remarkable year that horror has had on the big screen, genre fans should definitely avoid it as a final note for 2025.