Introduction
What’s the over/under on how much more money Blumhouse Productions can squeeze out of the FNaF film franchise? $200 million? $300 million? For those of you who aren’t part of the cult following of FNaF games, FNaF stands for Five Nights at Freddy’s. For those of you who are part of the cult, know that I hate you all a little bit right now. Because you spent $297 million to see the first (quite bad) FNaF film (made for a paltry $20 million), a sequel was made. And since you will probably spend a similar amount to see the much worse Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, there’s going to be at least one more sequel that I’m going to begrudgingly sit through.
Yes, Five Nights at Freddy’s was a turd of a film. Moreover, I said even the fanboys should ask for seventeen dollars back. Further, the only reason I didn’t include it among the worst movies of 2023 was that the animatronics were at least visually interesting. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 gets no such consolation, and it even makes the animatronics worse.
Synopsis
The film begins with a scene set in 1982. A young girl named Charlotte is at a birthday party at the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. She witnesses a boy being snatched by someone in a Freddy suit and is disdainfully dismissed by practically every parent in the building as she frantically tries to tell them what she saw.
Finding no help, she attempts to rescue the boy herself and ends up stabbed and dying in front of those same parents who barely care that a girl bleeds to death in the arms of a marionette animatronic. Everything about this scene is executed terribly. It’s also completely unbelievable from a storytelling perspective and a small taste of what the audience is forced to swallow for the next ninety minutes.
Flash forward to a year after the events of the first film (twenty years after Charlotte’s death) where we meet back up with the three survivors of the first film, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail).
After an awkward date between Mike and Vanessa and an even more awkward conversation between them at Mike’s house (interspersed with Abby whining that she wants to see her dead kid friends again), I realized how much I disliked all of them. The film goes out of its way to make us wonder if maybe Vanessa’s serial killer father (Matthew Lillard) was right.
Meanwhile, the security guard (Freddy Carter) at the original Freddy’s invites and escorts three ghost hunters to explore the dilapidated restaurant. Led by Lisa (McKenna Grace), they split up to check out various areas. Lisa’s partners are quickly dispatched, and Lisa is possessed by Charlotte. Not even trying to hide his glee or obvious ill intentions, the security guard leaves after watching the possession happen.
Discussion
This scene is nearly as bad as the opening flashback. Yet for different reasons. The two murders are as bloodless and sanitized as Charlotte’s murder. This reinforces how very PG-13 this movie is. It blows the identity of the non-supernatural villain well prior to the film’s sad and half-hearted reveal in the climax. It also completely wastes McKenna Grace, who is depossessed a short while later. Her dead body was left in a storage room. At this point, it seems as if Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has abandoned the entire premise of the murder bots. That’s not to say they aren’t still in the movie. However, they really don’t do much.
After Charlotte escapes the restaurant, she sends the bots to kill the parents from that 1982 birthday party. In an attempt to stop them, non-evil Mike stays at Freddy’s, working on the computer to try to disconnect the bots’ network connections. Bet you weren’t expecting a major plot point to be disconnecting a router.
There are far more terrible components to this film. Wayne Knight playing an asshat science teacher, to name one. But perhaps the worst component was also the only one that elicited an actual audible reaction from the audience. At one point, Abby is possessed by Charlotte, and Mike exorcises Charlotte by playing a music box at her that Charlotte’s dad (Skeet Ulrich) gave her.
As Charlotte (now in marionette form for some reason) slithers away, Mike puts the music box away. The entire audience, myself included, let out a collective “why are you putting it away?!” groan. Yet, does Charlotte come flying back into Abby, or into any of the humans? And shouldn’t Abby be dead like Lisa? Don’t be absurd.
Conclusion
That groan nicely sums up this laughably atrocious film. Like the last film, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has no idea what it wants to be. Screenwriter Scott Cawthon and director Emma Tammi have now made two films with no entertainment value. They’re both confusing with nonsensical storytelling, bland and shallow characters, and barely any scares (and a paltry five wildly uncreative kills). And to top it off, the movie ends with an actual cliffhanger, figuratively slapping the audience in the face.
