Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Parent Guide

Mike (Josh Hutcherson), Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), and Abby (Piper Rubio) were lucky to escape the dilapidated Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza with their lives, but their story hasn’t inspired horror or caution in the community. Instead, Freddy’s is now a cultural phenomenon in town, with organizers planning a large festival themed around the disreputable franchise.

Despite the callousness of the townsfolk, Abby still misses her “friends”, as she calls the children trapped inside Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and the other animatronics from the restaurant. So she sneaks out to find them again, leaving Mike and Vanessa to rescue her and protect the town from whatever else Freddy’s has to offer.

Unsatisfied with the smoldering heap of misbegotten trash that is the first film, the filmmakers have plumbed new depths in this production. Somehow, the possessed animatronics are not the least human characters in the film, thanks to a combination of universally bad acting and the incomprehensibly bad writing. Your average soap opera bears a better resemblance to human conversation than this joyless exercise in head-pounding frustration.

Unhelpfully, the film keeps trying to be funny, which ranks as slightly less amusing than a corpse belching during the wake. It also keeps trying to be scary to a similarly cool reception. I mean, look – this is an adaptation of a video game built exclusively on jump scares, and the film doesn’t offer anything else. (You can get a similar thrill by asking your family doctor to whack you on the knee with that little mallet. Considering that I would have paid a lumberjack to crack me in the head with a sledgehammer to get out of watching this movie, a reflex test seems like a great deal.)

Like the original, this sequel snuck in at a PG-13, not because its premise involving a child murderer and the trapped souls of his victims became family friendly, but because nothing happens. The plot is a vast and pointless desert through which the characters complain and exposit at one another until it’s time for someone else to get brutally killed, starting another cycle of wooden blathering. Parents may also wish to note the occasional profanity and brief episodes of social drinking – you know, in case you were still mulling over whether you wanted to take your kids to watch a robot crush a man’s head.

This is truly one of the most incoherent, insufferable, and irritating films I’ve ever had the cosmic misfortune to sit through. So much so that it managed to arouse a sense of lively contempt even in my cold, shriveled, callused, bitter little critic’s heart. And, if the sequel-baiting is anything to go by, we can expect further depths in storytelling as yet undiscovered. Just another cheerful thought as we slouch grimly into another holiday season.

About author

Keith Hawkes

Keith Hawkes graduated from Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada with a degree in English and History. His interests are movies, American literature, science fiction, almost every kind of music, and museums. He enjoys criticizing films for fun - although he's okay with being paid for it.