I also said in my review that I'd likely give the sequel a shot when it it streaming, and a little over three weeks later, here we are. Much like the last movie, the sequel is full of untapped potential. Watching it, you can see that there's so much potential for an amazing horror movie. But that potential goes utterly untapped. I desperately wanted to like this movie, for its makers to say, "We're gonna cut loose and show you what we can really do." But no, they didn't do that. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is just more of the same old bullshit I saw last time.
The bulk of the story takes place one year after we left Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to put the whole thing behind him, while Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is haunted by nightmares of the animatronics and her murderous father (Matthew Lillard). Young Abby (Piper Rubin), however, is still in mourning. The ghosts inside the animatronics were her friends, even if she knew them only briefly.
She sneaks out one night to see them, hoping that they're still some semblance of active, but is heartbroken when she discovers that they aren't. Abby does, however, find a "FazTalker" toy (imagine a Freddy Fazbear-branded version of a Speak & Spell) in the remains of the pizzeria's prize booth and takes it home to remember them by.
But there's some rough stuff up ahead. A group of ghost hunters visit the very first Freddy Fazbear's location, which was closed down shortly after a child was killed there in 1982. They end up accidentally awakening "the Marionette," a cruel animatronic powered by the unfettered rage of that murdered child's spirit. The Marionette contacts Abby through the FazTalker and pretends to be the friendly animatronics she knows, manipulating her into helping the original location's animatronics reach the outside world so that the spirit can finally have the revenge it has spent twenty years longing for.
This is a bad movie. It actually doubles down on what I didn't like about the first one, by having more stuff that could've made for an awesome movie front and center but never doing anything worth a damn with it. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 has fantastic outfits for the animatronic performers to wear, bigger stakes, and an intriguing villain that could be a million times scarier than what we saw in the first movie if used right. But it's still a lousy movie, and that somehow makes it worse. A movie that obviously has all the cards to be great but still turns out bad is somehow more disappointing than just a straightforward bad movie.
Director Emma Tammi returns to helm the movie, and she does a slightly better job behind the camera this time around, but that isn't saying much. The movie's pacing is horribly inconsistent, never really getting into any kind of groove as it stops and starts trying to balance its different subplots. And then there's the fact that absolutely nothing resembling suspense is on the menu at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. All you're getting are loud noises and shitty jump scares instead of things that are actually frightening. I know the game franchise relies a lot on that kind of thing and doing that makes it accurate to the games, but it gets very tiresome in movie form. It's the equivalent of someone jumping out of nowhere and blowing an air horn in your ears every few minutes. It's one of those cases where I'd actually be okay with an adaptation straying as far as possible from the source material.
I'm also astounded by how tame the movie is. I know aiming for a PG-13 was a necessity because the movie's target audience is so young. But what little violence is in the movie feels so dreadfully limp because of it. Some characters are attacked via jump scare and disappear from the movie. Another is torn to pieces and what we see looks like a production assistant hacked up a mannequin and threw the parts onto the set. Someone else gets his head crushed by "Toy Freddy" and it just looks like he's getting a scalp massage. I'd be foolish to expect a ton of gore, but give us something.
There is, however, one sequence roughly forty minutes into the movie that I really liked, where Vanessa tries confronting the spirit of her father in a dream. The scene is actually very well done, genuinely serving as the scariest part of the movie. The whole movie being more like this would've made for something I'd have enjoyed a lot more (or at least hated less).
Scott Cawthon, meanwhile, has sole writing credit for the sequel, and you can definitely tell he's a game developer and not a movie writer. The story feels like a bunch of subplots that Cawthon came up with but never bothered developing. For example, Abby is ostracized at school because her classmates all think she's a weirdo, with only one little boy giving her the time of day. Cawthon could've spun that into Abby making a human friend and being at ease without her beloved animatronics, but the little boy only has two or three scenes tops. An epilogue where he invites Abby to hang out with him would've been welcomed, a cute moment to conclude the movie, but he's ultimately not important to anything going on.
And I absolutely cannot forget FazFest. It's established that Mike and Abby's aunt was committed to an asylum after encountering "Golden Freddy" in the first movie, her outrageous story about haunted mascots from the local pizza place sparking an urban legend that becomes the theme of the town festival seen in this movie. However, the festival idea accomplishes nothing outside of "Toy Chica" (who is inexplicably voiced by Megan Fox of Jennifer's Body and Transformers fame) defending an upset Abby and a fun moment where "Toy Freddy" is believed to be someone in a costume, but the festival idea doesn't accomplish anything.
The animatronics are out in public at a festival themed around them, why not have them run amuck at the festival itself? Make it like the cornfield rave scene from Freddy vs. Jason. Even if the PG-13 rating would keep it from being a bloodbath, the concept alone could've made for an awesome climax. Beyond one scene where Vanessa stops "Toy Bonnie" from attacking a family in their house, the last half hour of the movie is at the original pizzeria and the Schmidt house. It leaves the festival as another idea with amazing potential that went nowhere.
And then there's the cast, who is once again dull as dishwater with the exception of Matthew Lillard. He's genuinely frightening in the one scene he's in. It's the scariest part of the entire movie, and it made me feel like he should be the primary monster instead of the Marionette or the Fazbear gang. But that's the sad part is, like I said, he's in one scene. If any Five Nights at Freddy's fans are reading this, please answer this: does his character get a bigger role in any of the games? I ask because I will absolutely watch as many sequels as it takes for him to be given more to do.
To be fair, I won't completely crap on all the actors in the movie though. Skeet Ulrich isn't bad in his cameo as the father of the spirit haunting the Marionette, and I'd have enjoyed seeing more of Mckenna Grace in her small role as the leader of the ghost hunters. But much like the first movie, Lillard absolutely steals the show here.
One of the ghost hunters asks early in the movie, "What the hell kind of kid would want to come here?" I'm asking myself the same question. It just blows my mind that the Five Nights at Freddy's super-fans would be okay with this. But I guess if they keep making money, why change what works? Five Nights at Freddy's 2 might be a bad movie, but I can't say it wasn't a hit. It'd probably made even more money and waited another few weeks for its digital release if Avatar: Fire and Ash hadn't just come out looking to kill everything else at the December box office. There will surely be a third movie, if the post-credits scenes were any indication. All I can hope is that whenever it comes out, the third time will be the charm and I'll actually like it.
Final Rating: *½
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