Review: 'Five Nights At Freddy's 2' Is Exactly 33.33% Better Than Its Miserable Predecessor
Fans of the games and young moviegoers hoping for a gateway horror film deserve better than this willfully lousy (after a solid first act) snooze-fest that treats its IP as an excuse to barely try
Written by Scott Cawthon and directed by Emma Tammi, Blumhouse and Universal’s second film in an ongoing adaptation of the ridiculously popular horror game franchise gets off on the right foot. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 opens with a grim, scary prologue that delivers well-staged Hitchcockian flair amid a clever inversion of the standard “witness to terrible violence is helpless to prevent it” De Palma trope. And the past-tense exposition dumps and character reacclimation moments are delivered with a lively wit and a particular specificity that A) earns warm chuckles and B) seems to be a page out of the M. Night Shyamalan playbook of “dialogue so aggressively quirky that it comes off as uncommonly human.” That includes Josh Hutcherson’s joshing friendship with a returning Theodus Crane, as well as the playfully awkward – yet somewhat authentic – not quite courtship between Mike and Elizabeth Lail’s Vanessa, a would-be romance that Piper Rubio’s little sister Abby sympathetically endorses.
None of this stuff, the human-sized connections or PTSD-addled emotional struggles, is on par with (for example) Scream 2 or Signs, nor is the welcome increase in size and scale of this $36 million follow-up on par with Smile 2. However, the first 35 minutes deliver fun performances, some welcome “first film to second film” character growth, and unto itself entertainment value for those of us who came to see a movie rather than a slew of Easter Eggs or game–specific references. For the first third or so, I started to wonder if this second FNAF was going to be one of those sequels to a lousy franchise-starter that delivers what we (and yes, I’m including the hardcore fanbase) damn well deserved the first time around. Alas, any concerns about a “Tomb Raider Trap” situation are rendered asunder when the picture stops dead in its tracks to undercut what’s working to focus on…nothing much at all.
