THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
I have a confession to make. I… am a Five Nights at Freddy’s fan. Not just a casual fan either. Being freshly 13 when the first game was released (August 8th, 2014), and getting into horror for the first time, I was the prime target to be swept up by the craze. And swept up I was, becoming a disciple of Markiplier and MatPat, eagerly awaiting the release of each new game, and even reading the original novel trilogy (I was so OG my copy of The Silver Eyes was literally a proof because it wasn’t officially published yet. Beat that, Gen Alpha.) I wish I could say my love for this franchise died down as I matured, but Freddy had me in the pad of his paw and wouldn’t let go. Now I am something of a walking lore machine – as much as one can be for a franchise as expansive, illogical and downright confusing as this. Don’t even mention the 20+ short story collections that have been released in recent years. Point is, I am one of the original FNAF fans, which should put my feelings in this review into context.
When the first film came out in 2023, I lapped it up like an animatronic cat. Yes, technically Blumhouse’s offering was not good, managing to be too lore-intensive for newcomers but also far too stripped back for the fans, but it had its moments, and seeing the games come to life with glorious puppetry from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop was somewhat rapturous. Soon, much like the game series, one was never going to be enough. The second film was quickly announced, bringing the promise of more animatronics, more lore drops, and more opportunities to reference the Josh Hutcherson Whistle edit. Further developments added to the fever dream, as Megan Fox and MatPat himself were announced as the voices of Toy Chica and Bonnie. The hype was becoming real. Seeing the new animatronics, particularly fan favourites like Mangle and the Marionette, would be worth the price of admission. Or so I thought.
The first film was written by game creator Scott Cawthon, alongside director Emma Tammi and Seth Cuddeback. The second film is written exclusively by Scott Cawthon, and boy does it show. He is absolutely not a professional screenwriter, and the sequel becomes both overstuffed and utterly plotless; character development is non-existent, with Josh Hutcherson being virtually sidelined in the plot; and the climax is, in the words of Foxy, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. Why they let him write this alone, I will never know. Blumhouse doesn’t exactly have a reputation for releasing consistently high-quality content, but they have put out some fun projects lately (Speak No Evil, Drop, Black Phone 2 and M3GAN 2.0 all did what they needed to do). But this is more akin to their early 2024 output – Imaginary, AfrAId, and one of the worst films I have ever seen, Night Swim. Cawthon shoves in a menagerie of game references, more animatronics than you can shake a stick at, and an unfortunately minimal amount of the superb, scene-stealing Matthew Lillard as murderer William Afton.
Basically every animatronic other than Toy Chica and the Marionette is superfluous to the plot, with the biggest waste being the Withered animatronics – dilapidated and broken versions of the original four characters that serve as the scariest designs of the film, but are basically reduced to a single scene’s worth of content. There is also a very strange choice to have the Marionette possess characters, turning them into vengeful puppet-faced monsters. In the games, the Marionette is not an evil character, so turning it into a straight-up villain here feels like it goes against one of the game’s core characterisations. At the film’s climax, the original animatronics return through the power of friendship to destroy their new counterparts with disappointing ease. After teasing a Fazbear Festival for the whole runtime, the film does absolutely nothing with this and sets its final fight – if you can call it that – in… Mike’s house. It feels like they ran out of budget and had to tack something on at the end. Or maybe Cawthon just doesn’t know how to effectively structure a film.
The one area that can never be faulted, however, is the production design. Thank GOD they didn’t cheap out on this, because even when the story, characters, etc. are lacking, you know the animatronics look DAMN good. It’s always funny to me how sexy Cawthon made Chica in this game. Why the hell does that chicken have tits and a dump truck ass? Why is she only wearing a bib and panties? It also leads to one of the film’s funniest moments, as Chica’s chicken boobs literally explode and Marionette’s head flies out to jumpscare the audience. The rest of the animatronics look pretty spectacular, but it should also be mentioned that the attention to detail in the sets for the old Freddy restaurants is equally impressive. Seeing Balloon Boy propelloring his way through the indoor river ride is absolutely hilarious. Jim Henson’s ghost haunted every one of those animatronics, and the film is (marginally) better for it.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is not a good film. The story is bad, the acting is bad, the kills are lame (PG-13 horror needs to die). But beyond that, I fail to see what it even offers veteran fans of the franchise. Maybe for the Gen Alpha kids who have become obsessed with it, their TikTok-rotted 8-year-old brains will appreciate the visuals without caring for the nuances of good filmmaking. But for the Gen-Z stalwarts, this film has exactly the same issues as the first, in even greater abundance. The other fans might delude themselves into thinking this is peak cinema because they got to see Withered Bonnie on screen – hence an insane 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I demand more for my time and money.
When Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 inevitably comes out, I hope to God they have demanded co-writers for Scott Cawthon and try to do something interesting. If the films are not directly canon, then why not play around and try to tell a new story? And for the love of God, please give Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich some shared screentime. Having them both in this film and not doing a full Scream reunion is the greatest evil of all.
Director: Emma Tammi
Cast: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard
Runtime: 104m
Certificate: 15
Image: Universal Pictures