Despite the fact that 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s was quite critically mauled, its $297 million global haul spoke to the contrary. Fans seemed to eat up what director Emma Tammi and co-writer Scott Cawthon (the creator of the video game series it’s based upon) put forth, even if they too readily admitted that the supposed horror film was really anything but. Noting that they listened to what the fans said, Tammi and Cawthon have quite vocally projected that the atmosphere many missed from the original would be laced across Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
Did they deliver?
Whilst I’ll admit that, yes, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has raised its eeriness factor and injected more technical scares to proceedings, much of what takes place across the film’s 104 minutes feels telegraphed, a bit cheap and, sadly, resigned for a more 12-year-old mind-frame. It certainly sets up a decent premise though, with the film opening in 1982 where a young girl, Vanessa, witnesses one of the Freddy Fazbear Pizza restaurant figures – the creepy Marionette – possess one of her friends and damn her to an eternity as a tortured soul roaming the halls of the defunct restaurant.
That Vanessa grew up to be a police officer and was the daughter of the first film’s villain (Matthew Lillard‘s serial killer, William Afton), and when this sequel leans into her lingering trauma, as well as focusing on the Marionette figure, it feels like a slightly stronger product; Elizabeth Lail reprising her role as Vanessa, doing her best with Cawthon’s juvenile script. The Marionette is only sporadically used, with the film focusing (understandably) on the possessed animatronics that Vanessa, Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio) thought they had overcome the year prior. Poor Abby, something of a loner at school (and, oddly, the target of bullying from her science teacher, played by Wayne Knight), misses her “friends”, and believes that revisiting the abandoned pizza restaurant where the souls of all the murdered children supposedly lay will cure such.
We all know this is the worst idea, and when a new set of animatronics are awoken it sets off what should be something of a horrific slaughter for the small town who have seemingly swept the Freddy Fazbear murders under the rug. The idea that these souls are intent on killing the town’s parents as a way to punish them for ignoring the cries of Vanessa and her friend that was eventually possessed by the Marionette is a good angle, but Cawthon’s script proves too incomprehensible that it feels almost unable to maintain a sense of cohesion of its own action.
It all basically leads to where you expect it to – until it doesn’t. With a third film allegedly already in the works, it makes sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 would lean into a sense of continuation, but, criminally, it aims for such with a wildness that is as insulting as it is commendable. Clearly knowing what it wanted to set up for one of its characters, motivations don’t feel earned in the film’s final minutes as it rushes towards a new narrative, with a real “Oh, that’s how you’re going to end it?” mentality. The cut to end credits on this is frustrating, to say the least.
Whilst, yes, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a minor improvement over the original, the small flourishes it suggests what it could have been only, ultimately, play against it. Hutcherson seems bored with it all and the missed opportunity to reunite Scream kings Lillard and Skeet Ulrich (as a grieving parent) stings from a genre perspective, but, again, maybe fans will forgive its multitude of shortcomings and take it for the simplistic scarer it is perhaps aiming to be; they spoke before in spades (and money), time will tell if they do the same.
TWO STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is now screening in Australian theatres.
