Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is all crust, no toppings.
The trouble with Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is that it mistakes an encyclopaedic regurgitation of lore for an actual story, and while it may service its fanbase adequately it’s doing nothing to recruit and expand that fanbase through the cinema screen.
Picking up a year after the first film, the sequel picks up a year after the events of the first film, and also eighteen years before it as we flashback to another Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza venue – the original this time – and witness a young girl, charlotte, being fatally stabbed by founder William Afton after she attempts to save a boy he was trying to murder. At the moment of death, Charlotte’s spirit bonds with the puppet-like Marionette, awoken when a group of paranormal youtubers accidentally wake her from her slumber in the present. Meanwhile, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and Afton’s psychologically traumatised daughter, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), are all attempting to move on in their own ways but when Abby is tricked into releasing the animatronic inhabitants of the original Freddy Fazbear’s, everyone’s forced into taking another slice of mechanised mayhem.
If the fundamental flaw in Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is its refusal to explain the lore it draws from for those unfamiliar with the convoluted minutiae, its compounded by the performances of a cast who seem equally uninterested in providing emotional clarity. Hutcherson just seems tired, but whether it’s the script or the direction, its hard to avoid that its young Piper Rubio who’s the franchise’s LVP delivering a performance that feels more on-brand for a SyFy mockbuster. In turn, Lail, Lillard and an underused McKenna Grace amp up their performances to breath a semblance of life into the meat feast mannequins that make up the people side of the pizzeria poltergeist plot.
The disjointed, almost arbitrary, nature of the storytelling is exacerbated by just plain sloppy filmmaking. Character motivations are murky at best and the sequel opts for the most conventionally uninteresting tropes of tame horror, relying on repetitive jump scares that feel tired before they’re triggered and director Emma Tammi seems strikingly disinterested in cultivating the unique, unsettling atmosphere the games are known for and the first film did at least manage to recreate. The action sequences are particularly underwhelming and throughout the whole film there’s a palpable lack of spatial coherence and consistency that creates confusion and disappointment in equal measure and overshadows the things the film does actually do well.
The only unequivocal success in Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is, once again, the physical presence of the creatures themselves. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop delivers exceptional work, bringing the Marionette, Freddy, Bonnie, and the others to life with a genuinely tactile, frightening reality. The meticulous detail in the puppets – in all their iterations – provides the film with a visual weight that no amount of shaky CGI could achieve. It’s just a shame this technical mastery is having to carry the entire film and mitigate for the sloppiness surrounding them.
Part of the problem may be that Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 isn’t a film that has a beginning, middle and end to tell; it’s all middle, it’s mind too focussed on Five Nights At Freddy’s 3 to bother with making sense this time round. Its only job is to introduce new bits of lore and new characters so that they’re available for Blumhouse to squeeze every last drop of box office potential from this nostalgia strip mining operation. On the basis of this, one night at Freddy’s is already too long but clearly the intent is to keep cinema audiences there night after night, for what’ll feel like an eternity.
