Review: 'Five Nights at Freddy's 2' is fan service at its worst, a horror thriller that will bore all but the die-hards
Two years ago, director Emma Tammi had it both ways with her cinematic take on Scott Cawthon’s video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s” — delivering the characters and jump-scare shocks the game’s fans demanded, while trying to craft a plausible and fairly good horror thriller that newcomers could enjoy.
Now, the inevitable sequel, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” goes all in with the fans, and leaves anyone on the outside wondering why anything this tedious and incoherent ever made it to theaters. And, what’s worse, the whole thing ends with an obvious attempt to set up a third movie.
The prologue sets up what’s ostensibly different about this chapter of the story. It’s a flashback to 1982, in what we quickly learn is the original location for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where animatronic animal characters entertain kids amid the arcade games, ball pit and pizza parties going on around them. These scenes focus on one introverted girl, Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie), whose obsession with one animatronic creature — The Marionette — ends badly.
Fast-forward 20 years, and we’re back with the characters from the first movie. Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to raise his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), who’s now 11 and has a not-so-healthy fascination with robotics. Mike is also, as we see early, about to go out on a first date with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), the cop who helped take down the possessed animatronics in their local Freddy’s restaurant.
Vanessa is dealing with bad dreams, mostly involving her dead father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard), the creator of the original Freddy’s and its creepy animal figures. She hasn’t been entirely honest with Mike about everything she knows about her father’s work, but it all comes spilling out when a group of young ghost-hunting social-media stars (led by “Regretting You’s” McKenna Grace) accidentally unleash the Charlotte-possessed Marionette, which aims to kill parents everywhere by remotely controlling the original Freddy robots.
Tammi is back directing this sequel, and she manages to create a few good movie scares. The key weakness here is the script, credited solely to Cawthon, the game’s creator, who’s good at referencing his past work but terrible at setting up a movie scenario more complicated than a jump scare. Those tricks may work repeatedly in a video game, where they catch you because your mind is busy trying to figure out the gameplay, but get old fast in a movie.
Then there are the copious Easter eggs, which are given more thought than the movie’s actual plot. One sequence involves the Freddy character attacking a family on Elm Street (get it?). YouTuber CoryxKenshin returns in a cameo as a disbelieving cab driver. And horror movie fans will get a chuckle, maybe, when they see the actor who plays Charlotte’s father: Skeet Ulrich, Lillard’s partner in crime in the original “Scream” back in 1996.
Winking references, though, do not a good movie make. Neither do telegraphed “twists” that are included only to set up a third movie. If the point of the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” franchise is that observers are supposed to survive in this creepy scenario, the makers should really make sure those entering Freddy’s world don’t die from boredom first.
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‘Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’
★
Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violent content, terror and some language. Running time: 104 minutes.