4/12 ForReel Score | 2/5 Stars

It is difficult for me to fall too deeply into despair about my experience seeing Five Nights At Freddy’s 2. I knew what I was getting into. The first film was scare free and did not have a drop of originality, but it was ultimately harmless kiddie horror that pleased its adolescent target audience. For decades, studios have had to deal with vocal and demanding fandoms of superheroes and sci-fi/fantasy novels. Folks who are passionate about capturing the tone and substance of the material in question. This has not been a problem with this new crop of young gen Z/elder gen alpha video game movie fans that drove films like Freddy’s and A Minecraft Movie to massive success. The Five Nights At Freddy’s games do have winding, complex lore that these films could easily explore in more depth, but these folks don’t seem miffed about just getting the basics. As long as Freddy, Chica and Foxy simply appear on screen and give them a couple of jump scares that let them test out screaming and giggling in a public space, they consider it a success. At first, hearing my young audience’s loud and awkward reactions to this film’s key moments was making me feel insane but after a while, my mind settled in. On this night, I was not in the movie theater that I know and love. For better or worse, I was in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.

We pick up shortly after the events of the original. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying his best to get his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) to move on from her obsession with the kids trapped inside the now defunct animatronic monsters they faced. She’s not listening. Her obsession with tracking down ways to fix her friends coincides with the lingering trauma of Mike’s pal Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). She’s having nightmares about her father William (Matthew Lillard) returning from the dead to hunt her. Meanwhile, the town is about to celebrate Fazfest, a monument to the collective obsession with these horrific crimes and legendary animatronics. This creates a perfect window for spirits living inside the original Fazbear’s Pizza location to plot an attack on our cast after taking out a group of ghost hunters led by Lisa (Mckenna Grace).

My issue with these movies is technical. These animatronics are simply too large and cumbersome to lend themselves to any entertaining on screen chaos. I understand why this is effective in the context of a game where you are planted to a chair looking at security cameras. A jumpscare with a crazy face connotes instant death. The thought of something so friendly yet freakish tearing you apart off-screen is eerie. However, that’s not the experience that Emma Tammi is creating. Often, when these guys jump scare us, our characters just scream and run away. When they don’t, they’re killed in such slow, unconvincing ways that the camera has to cut away because there is no way to physically show it that wouldn’t be laughable. In an ideal scenario, this franchise would be a modern day Gremlins. We’d have the whole gang sprinting around tearing the whole town to shreds, taking out dozens of innocent people, and cracking whichever version of campy meta jokes would please the fans. For whatever reason, Tammi seems convinced that there’s potential for something more conventional and even serious, and there just isn’t.

It certainly doesn’t help that her cast is laughably bad. Josh Hutcherson fares the best, lending slight dramatic chops where he can. He has a hard time pretending to be scared, though. There’s a sequence that very poorly pays homage to the style of the games where Mike is trying to hack into the creatures’ systems to get them to turn off as they surround him, and he often seems like he’s about to burst out laughing. I can only imagine these were some long days looking at these completely non threatening robots and it shows. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Lail and Piper Rubio simply do not have the screen presence or acting ability needed to carry a film. They’re tasked with delivering the film’s most emotional material but their stiff line readings feel ripped out of a daytime soap. Matthew Lillard has a thankless single scene cameo, so don’t see it for him. The only two people who are bringing the necessary camp to the table are Wayne Knight as a persnickety robotics teacher and Megan Fox as Chica, who scores some laughs with her snarkily robotic deliveries.

There was a moment during the aforementioned hacking scene where Mike points a flashlight down a dark hallway at absolutely nothing. My audience howled. They reacted more loudly to that than any of the scares with any tangible threat. These kids know that they’re watching slop and they want it that way. For whatever reason, dumb and blatantly unambitious are qualities that make for a must see experience. As has been made plain by the box office results in recent months, the kids aren’t interested in seeing a movie for a movie’s sake. They want an excuse to be in a dark room exclusively with people their age, where they can let out all of that untrained antisocial behavior that brewed during COVID while something they recognize is blaring in the background. Who am I to deny them that? Whatever keeps the theaters open.

Movie Review: “Five Nights At Freddy’s 2” Delivers The Artless Experience The Fans Have Demanded