‘Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’ Review: The Animatronic Killers Are Back, and So Is the Slapdash Filmmaking, in the Lousy Sequel to 2023’s Monster Hit

“Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film. The “monsters” are amusing to look at, at least for a few minutes — they’re 10-foot-tall, clanking-metal animatronic mascots that escape from the dingy ruins of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, an abandoned kiddie birthday emporium. They can loom up in a threatening way, but they aren’t especially frightening, and the director, Emma Tammi (returning from the first film), stages the violence in such an innocuous way that you feel like you’re watching some bowdlerized network-TV version of a horror film, with the good parts cut out.

This is not an accident. One of the reasons “Five Nights at Freddy’s” was such a massive hit two years ago is that it was the definition of a PG-13 horror movie: not edgy enough, not scary enough, but just catchy enough in brand and concept to lure in millions of underage video-game freaks. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a major overlap between that movie’s fan base and the fan base for the “Sonic” films.)

At one point in “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” Chica (voiced by Megan Fox), the giant animatronic baby chick with bedroom eyelashes and “Let’s Party!” written on her shirt, stalks a high-school teacher (Wayne Knight) on the night of the science fair. “What I want is to see what’s going on inside your head,” she says right before squeezing his brains out, though the scene is so unexplicit it remains entirely abstract. “Just what I thought,” says Chica. “Nothing in there at all!” There’s nothing in the movie’s head either. It’s just smirky horror yocks for kids, though the folly of this fan-service debacle is that the film gets all tangled up in its convoluted backstory.

In 1982, 20 years before “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” takes place, we see a party at Freddy’s, where a lone girl, Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie), knew something was amiss. She watched a little boy get taken away by Freddy, the Teddy Bear mascot, and despite her frantic pleas every parent there just brushed her aside. (The way this is staged is so unbelievable it sets the movie on a course of pure schlock.) Freddy, it turned out, was a serial killer in a costume — the one played by Matthew Lillard in the first film. (Lillard is in the new movie for a few minutes.) Charlotte rescued the boy, but in doing so she was killed; she died in front of everyone at the party. Now her spirit has bonded with the Marionette, an animatronic mascot who looks like a kabuki version of Jigsaw. It’s this fused demon who’s making everything happen.

Josh Hutcherson is back as Mike, the former security guard at Freddy’s, who spends much of the new movie gawking at a computer screen. Piper Rubio is back as Abby, Mike’s kid sister, who had befriended the mascots and still thinks they’re her friends — it’s her desire to reconnect with the child ghosts inside them that gets the story rolling. (That’s also the kind of convolution that can make your head hurt.) And the appealing Elizabeth Lail is back as Vanessa, the serial killer’s daughter (the film seems to have forgotten she’s a police officer), who might be getting romantically involved with Mike. All of this is happening simply because the movie, written by Scott Cawthorn (creator of the Freddy’s video-game empire), needs stuff to happen in between weakly staged mascot attacks. But we could hardly care less about it; it’s grinding B-movie gears as “universe building.” At one point it’s revealed that the shiny towering mascots are less powerful than the dirty, damaged prototype versions of them that are sitting in the basement of Freddy’s. Why? Why ask why.

In 2021, two years before the movie version of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” came out, there was a jokey indie horror movie called “Willy’s Wonderland” that was a total knockoff of the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” concept. It starred Nicolas Cage as a drifter who gets stranded in a small town, where he’s forced to spend from dusk till dawn cleaning the title emporium. The animatronic mascot attacks in that movie were genuinely violent (and 10 times as inventive as the ones in the “Freddy’s” films), and Cage, who literally didn’t speak a word of dialogue in the entire movie, had so much aura that he turned the act of cleaning into something hypnotically satisfying. “Willy’s Wonderland” made a total of $450,000 at the box office, but it was nifty and riveting horror camp. “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” which will likely make $60 million this week, is slapdash product that never quite figures out what it’s doing. It operates according to one rule: The gamers must be served.