Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (now streaming on Peacock, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) posits an impossible question: What if someone had the balls to make a movie that’s even worse than Five Nights at Freddy’s? Granted, the 2023 video game adaptation/deadass incomprehensible mess wasn’t an all-timer of a turkey – it invoked less ire, more ennui from me – although I’m suddenly prompted to wonder if indifference is indeed more powerful than hate. Anyway, that $300 million box office hit spawned this $200 million-and-counting sequel which manages to eclipse the first movie’s incompetence by being exasperatingly dull and muddled. And in that sense, it’s quite an achievement.
The Gist: It’s 1982. A young girl sees sinister shit happening in the employees-only areas of a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza happy happy joy joy children’s funplaytime screech-o-rama junk food and arcade game center with animatronic animal anthropomorphs who “perform” for sugared-up audiences – man, those places are exhausting – and the shit involves two notable things: One, the emergence of a new haunted animatronic character dubbed the Marionette, who looks kinda like a murdery, spidery Jack Skellington. And two, it introduces us to the only person who was nice to this witness to/victim of sinister killy-kill shit, Vanessa, as a youngster. Now it’s 2002, and Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is 20 years older, because that’s how time and life function. You may recall from the first movie that she’s a cop, and her dad, William (Matthew Lillard), is not only the founder of Fazbear’s, but also a serial killer. Which of these two things is worse, I’m not sure.
We’ll spend the rest of the movie in 2002, and soon get a nonsplanation as to why a ketchup-on-cardboard pizza joint uses “really powerful wifi,” although I can give you one: The plot really really needs it. How else would we get endless scenes in which a mouthbreathing Josh Hutcherson sits in front of a beige desktop computer trying to figure out how to deactivate the “really powerful wifi” so he can stop homicidal robot mascots (or HRMs if you’re into the whole brevity thing) from clodding very slowly through a celebratory “FazFest” street party that inexplicably celebrates how HRMs, haunted by the souls of dead folks, killed some people? Of course, some of them were friendly, and Josh Hutcherson Character’s little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) misses those specific HRMs because they were her friends; they were destroyed in the first movie and for some reason Josh Hutcherson Character has promised to rebuild them, as if he knew how to rebuild a robot, not to mention deposit a dead child’s soul into it. What the f— am I talking about? Where am I? I think I need to get outta here.
Too bad I can’t, though. The stupidest part of the plot involves some TV ghost hunters led by an idiot (McKenna Grace) whose crew visits the abandoned 1982 Fazbear’s location, which is different from the 2002 Fazbear’s location at which Josh Hutcherson Character used to be a security guard, not that we can tell them apart, because this movie got an F in Competent Storytelling 101. The idiot reawakens the Marionette, possessed by the dead girl from the opening scene. The rest of the plot involves a talking Fazbear toy through which Abby can communicate with the apparently not-dead HRMs, a different security guard (Freddy Carter), a science fair, Abby’s shitty and mean science teacher (Wayne Knight), a haunted music box and a secret wifi-enabled (aha!) code that’ll allow HRMs – some of which are evil and some of which are not, although telling them apart is a bit of an issue – to escape the confines of the abandoned Fazbear’s location. Do you care about any of this? Actually, a more relevant question: Are you 10 and addicted to YouTuber content? If so, you’re far more likely care.
Photo: Ryan Green / © Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Look, ma! I found a movie that’s almost as disorientingly Gen-Alpha-pilled than A Minecraft Movie!
Performance Worth Watching: Oof. I’m sorry to report that the entire cast acts as if they’re handcuffed and delivering their lines through six layers of duct tape.
Sex And Skin: None.
Photo: Everett Collection
Our Take: Why futz with a $300 million formula? Those who ate up FNAF (that’s pronounced “finaff,” boomer) weren’t at all bothered by its turgid pace, comatose performances and nonscary undrama, so they get more of the same, but it’s even more convoluted and incomprehensible to anyone who might wander into this franchise expecting things to “make sense.” See, “making sense” is apparently optional with this movie, which takes typical horror-lite scenarios and plot junk and clutters them with references to the FINAFF game and little inside, well, I’d call them “jokes” but the only thing funny about all this is how it fails to meet base standards of technical filmmaking, e.g. the editing, which the credits tell us was executed by two people, but for the audience feels more like execution by deadly electrified confusion, as we try to parse one location from another, and whose soul is in what mascot-plushie robot, and whether that soul is benevolent or evil – or some shade in-between, which sounds tantalizing in its moral ambiguity but only serves to turn muddy waters into thick, impenetrable sludge.
Worse still is FINAFF 2’s inability to generate anything resembling suspense. One scene tenuously leads to another via a screenplay (by franchise creator Scott Cawthon) that’s structured like a junk drawer full of MacGuffins. “Creepy” sequences typically involve dimly lit corridors, flashlights with dying batteries, bad dreams and/or flashbacks and inexplicably slow-plodding robot antagonists. The narrative slowly, witlessly, listlessly builds to the inevitable unleashing of mayhem, and to call said mayhem underwhelming is gross understatement, and likely a rather broad definition of what “mayhem” is, because true mayhem is for certain not this boring.
Our Call: Get the finaff outta here. SKIP IT.
How To Watch Five Nights At Freddy’s 2
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John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.