Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 review
Blumhouse has to be stopped.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Directed by Emma Tammi
Written by Scott Cawthorn
Starring Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Theodus Crane, Skeet Ulrich and McKenna Grace
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Review
The quality of Blumhouse theatrical releases has been in the dumps for a while. We’ve touched on it before…especially when they destroyed their promising M3GAN franchise as quickly as they could by turning their back on its horror roots. But the problems go much deeper than that. When the best movie you’ve released in several years is an almost immediate remake of a great foreign film…that completely changes the point of the movie so it can be sanitized for general audiences…you know things have gotten bad. Five Nights at Freddy’s was a part of the problem. Despite its commercial success…it was a very bad movie. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is even worse.
The biggest problem doesn’t actually start with Blumhouse. It starts with franchise creator Scott Cawthorn. While his original concept launched a successful video game series…he is in no discernible way a screenwriter. The script for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is so bad that it belongs in its own category. There’s no beginning to the story…that was the last movie, I guess. But this one takes zero steps to remind you who anyone is or what their part in the overly complicated lore is. There’s no ending either. The story just stops at one point…while making sure to set up not one but two cliffhangers for a third installment. There’s no resolution to pretty much anything introduced in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. Oddly, there is one for something in the first movie though.
Forget complex storytelling ideas like having a beginning, middle and end. That’s not even the biggest issue with the script. Paper thin, one note characters speaking about their motivations is (probably) at the top of the list. There’s no nuance or subtlety whatsoever. If a character is supposed to be afraid…they’re going to say, “I’m afraid”. If they’re worried…they’re going to say, “I’m worried”. There are no deeper attempts at emotions than those…but if there were I am confident in how Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 would choose to convey them.
The first Five Nights at Freddy’s was a bad movie…but we didn’t know how good we had it until we got to part 2. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 feels twice as long as it is…and still only delivers half a story. There’s no suspense…no scares…no laughs…no anything. I’d usually chalk this up to being a quick cash in on the original’s surprise success…but it’s worse than that. They let someone who doesn’t understand how to tell a story turn in a script and Blumhouse said…good enough. How do we trust this production company going forward? They don’t care what slop they’re throwing on screen at this point.
After watching the first movie I questioned how someone could make a movie about killer animatronic animals so boring. After watching this one…I can only ask how someone managed to make one even worse. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is the most boring, nothing happening, no point but the box office return, movie we may have ever seen. It would be flat out ironic to see the lack of care coming from the creator of the property’s pen itself…if it wasn’t so obvious what happened here. Cawthorn thinks this is interesting. Because the first movie did big business…he thinks you do to. If you manage to find anything interesting while viewing Five Nights at Freddy’s 2…I could recommend some great sugar packets to read the back of. They’ll surely be more suspenseful. They’ll definitely offer a more complete narrative.
So, where do we go from here? This movie is going to make money. I have no doubt about it. Five Nights at Freddy’s was one of those movies that everyone saw even though no one ever brings up a reason they liked it. Kind of like how Avatar movies make more money than anything with zero cultural imprint. A third one of these is certainly on the way. Given the financial success it will probably enjoy…it’s unlikely Blumhouse cares about quality enough to take the pen away from its creator. We’re going to suffer through another round of this in a couple of years. It’s going to be terrible. I don’t know that it can be worse…but Cawthorn clearly ran out of his…one idea…a long time ago. Maybe it will be.
The only emotion you’re likely to feel while watching Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is sadness for the actors involved in the project. Scream stars Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich only have to endure cameo duty…but poor Josh Hutcherson has to wander through this repetitive, empty dreck looking just as confused by the situation as the people watching him on screen. McKenna Grace has a slightly larger role than Lillard and Ulrich, but the movie completely wastes her talent anyway. No one makes it out of a movie this bad unscathed. Which is ironic given that so few characters end up scathed at all with the story’s low stakes, rambling nature.
Scare Value
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is an all-time bad movie. In some ways…it is what people deserve after making the original such a hit. We need to be more discerning as a movie going public. This fails is a bad video game adaptation, a bad horror movie, a bad gateway horror movie and a bad movie full stop. The rule on our grading system is that you get one point just for technically having made a movie. Only one movie I’ve covered has ever failed to reach that bar. Five Night at Freddy’s is about as close as you can get.
1/5
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