A girl sitting alone in a crowded vintage pizzeria while in the corner of her eye she sees a man in a bunny costume leading a boy into the kitchen. She calls out for help, but all the adults dismiss her. The girl follows them to see the boy passed out on the floor while the man in the bunny suit, William Afton, is near. As the girl, Charlotte Emily, starts carrying the boy away, Afton chases her with a kitchen knife. She escapes to the stage in front of everyone with the boy in her arms and multiple stab wounds in her back. As she collapses under the stage, she falls into an animatronic called the marionette, putting her rageful soul into the machine.
With a movie opening like that, you expect the sequel Five Nights at Freddy (FNAF)’s to be legendary. But with the same movie with an under-developed plot and a frustrating cliffhanger, you would be wrong.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” released on Dec. 5 as the next installment of the movie franchise. As someone who watched the first movie, I had little expectations for “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” but was excited to see what the plot of the movie was. But it turns out, there is hardly a plot at all. The purpose of this movie was to set up for the next one, which is fine, but left viewers like myself unsatisfied.
The marionette is the villain in this movie and has a pretty clear goal and motive. It wants to control the other animatronics to kill previous workers of the pizzeria. Its motive is fueled by rage because nobody listened to her when she saw Afton kidnapping the kid. If someone listened, they probably could have stopped Afton at the beginning and prevented a lot of kids from dying. I would say the movie did a great job developing this new character.
Also, the movie did a great job by trying to push the PG-13 rating so instead of being a movie just for kids, older audiences could enjoy it as well. There is a significant increase in gore from the first movie. There’s one instance where Toy Chica, another new villain introduced in the movie, crushes a robotics teacher’s head until he dies. Scenes like those are what got the attention of older audiences, even people who are not FNAF fans but just want to enjoy the movie.
The setting and the visuals are also much better than the first movie. “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” takes place in the first Freddy Fazbear Pizzeria which is 1970s themed and has a cryptic feeling to it. The new animatronics, like the marionette, looked more developed in their design and were pretty scary.
Otherwise, I would say the movie is bad. One of the bigger reasons is because the movie seemed to be targeted to FNAF fans rather than a general audience. It’s respectable for the film to keep its integrity to the franchise , but is not too enjoyable to someone who is just looking for a scary movie. The movie has a handful of game references that some people might not understand unless they know the FNAF franchise in depth. Without FNAF lore knowledge, it seems like an average viewer might be left with many unanswered questions.
It almost seemed there was barely a plot at all. Mike Schmidt, one of the main characters and former security guard of the pizzeria, only cares to clean up his sister’s, Abby, mess after she frees the new dangerous animatronics. The whole reason why Abby set the animatronics free was to win in a robotics fair at her school. Vanessa, Afton’s daughter, has post-traumatic stress disorder from her possessive and psychopath father and tries to save Abby as well.
Ultimately, the movie does not achieve anything but setting up the next movie’s main villain, the marionette, by giving it a background story.
The ending was lackluster as well. The whole movie builds up a festival happening in town, before doing absolutely nothing with that setting. The final “fight” scene between the old animatronics of the first movie and the new animatronics seemed pretty lazy to me. I was expecting a more dramatic conclusion for stopping the loose animatronics.
At the end of the movie, Vanessa is alone in a house when the marionette comes up behind her and starts controlling her, leaving viewers with a cliffhanger. How can the marionette control humans? And how did it get there? I don’t get it. When that scene happened, I figured this is the climax where the movie actually starts. But no. Then the credits started rolling in.
The movie got 12% for critic reviews and 88% on viewer reviews, which makes sense. This movie was fundamentally bad but was made for hardcore FNAF fans. Personally, I would give it a 2/10.
