The nights seem to grow longer and duller in this pointless sequel.
Fans of the video-game series turned up in enough numbers to make the first screen adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s into a horror hit, which brings us to this dull and incompetent sequel. Viewers who aren’t thrilled by recognizing new characters from an old game, and who expect more from a movie than a handful of PG-13 jump scares, are advised to spend their night anywhere that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 isn’t screening.
Following the forgettable events of the first film, which involved a 1980s pizzeria and its animatronic figures that kidnapped and murdered children, our heroes are still reeling: traumatized Mike (Josh Hutcherson) just wants to move past it all and create a stable home for his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), while cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is still haunted by thoughts of creepy Freddy Fazbear and his pals, all the creation of her unhinged father William (Matthew Lillard).
Abby still misses her robot friends and thinks that she and Mike might one day repair them; he breaks it to her that it’s not going to happen, but takes her back to Freddy’s one last time, where she picks up a Speak-and-Spell–type toy that starts sending her messages from Freddy and the other robotic animals. Their voices lead her to the original prototype restaurant, one where the robots were all “conducted” by a character known as The Marionette. (While Freddy and his cohorts — rabbit Bonnie, duck Chica, and fox Foxy — are all cute creatures that can be made to look spooky and foreboding, the Marionette is creepy and off-putting from the jump; no wonder that character never made it out of the pizza chain’s beta-testing phase.)
The Marionette has a tragic backstory of its own, tied to Vanessa’s tortured past, and soon the animatronic figures are once again running amok as Mike and Vanessa attempt to restore order. Their quest is made all the more difficult by the blisteringly stupid screenplay by game creator Scott Cawthon. Characters make idiotic choices, even by horror-movie standards; essential information is withheld for no good reason; and the script’s logic, such as it is, demands that audiences forget what they know about science fairs, lullabies, and office doors.
The cast does what it can with such substandard material; Rubio at least makes Abby recognizably young and vulnerable without falling back on movie-kid manipulation, and while Hutcherson spends most of the film blandly moving the plot along, at least he’s got a good gig on HBO’s I Love LA that merits his efforts. McKenna Grace adds a little life as a cable-TV ghost-chaser (the film is set in 2002), but doesn’t get to stick around long enough to make an impact.
There are some lazy attempts at stunt-casting — a cameo from Lillard’s Scream-mate Skeet Ulrich, although the two have no scenes together, and Jurassic Park’s Wayne Knight as the world’s pettiest science teacher — but ultimately, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 makes no effort to expand its appeal beyond its built-in audience of gamers.
That’s a real shame, considering that both films could, if allowed, say something about the dark side of nostalgia and about the way childhood obsessions can weigh down adult development. All we get is a set of jerky, blinking robots that all too rarely show their teeth.
