MOVIE REVIEW: FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S 2

 

One year has passed since the supernatural nightmare at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Former security guard Mike has kept the truth from his 11-year-old sister, Abby, concerning the fate of her animatronic friends. When Abby sneaks out to reconnect with Freddy, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy, she sets into motion a terrifying series of events that reveal dark secrets about the true origin of Freddy's.

Director: Scott Cawthon

Cast: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Wayne Knight, Mckenna Grace, Teo Briones

Release Date: December 5, 2025 

Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Rated PG-13 for violent content, terror and some language.

Runtime: 1h 44m

Review:

Five Night at Freddy's 2 is a mess of a horror sequel that improves on the original merely because it’s so bad and incoherent that it’s funnier as it goes along.  Emma Tammi returns behind the camera and does a capable job of directing the action and delivering a handful of well-timed jump scares throughout.  She moves the action along at a steady pace in spite of the increasingly incoherent mythology being thrown onscreen.  Those who have played the games might get more of out all of this but as a straightforward film the number of illogical concepts and ideas thrown out onscreen are bound to confuse the uninitiated.  The main story cherry picks story elements from A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th padded with a pack of clichéd childhood trauma which makes everything feel very generic and terribly unoriginal.  There are plenty of nonsensical horror movies out there which still manage to be engaging or fun, but this one just leaves you scratching your head or asking more questions as the story gets sillier.  There are a variety of just goofy things like 80’s era animatronics having tracking mechanisms and location locks, returning characters being entirely unaware of other locations of the restaurant that are in the general area or an all-night science fair just to name a few.  The cast does what it can with the material with both Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail desperately searching for a better film to no avail.    They both are solid across the board even though their characters are thrown into a variety of exceedingly preposterous situations which is exemplified by Hutcherson’s character questioning the lack of a door in haunted pizza joint before using an animatronic face to confuse the possessed animatronic robots.  Piper Rubio returns from the original as Abby, it’s passable but hampered by an unfortunate haircut that might remind a few people of Lord Farquaad from the original Shrek.   Matthew Lillard returns for a quick hallucinatory sequence with Elizabeth Lail that’s far more inventive and interesting than everything else in the film.  Skeet Ulrich, Wayne Knight and Mckenna Grace have small supporting bits which really don’t add all that much to the overall film outside of throwing familiar faces at the screen.  Five Night at Freddy's 2 is at, the very least, funny even if unintentionally but the set up for a third part is real headscratcher because who exactly is asking for that.

D+