Blumhouse and Scott Cawthon Productions come together again to bring the long-awaited sequel to the 2023 film Five Nights at Freddy’s, with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
The film follows our main three characters, Michael and Abby Schmidt and Vanessa Afton as they try to continue their lives after the events of the first film, but after a group of ghost hunters enter the original pizzeria, they unleash an evil that our main three have to fight.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (FNAF 2) is exactly like the first film, but a little bit better.
FNAF 2, just like the first one, is for fans of the franchise, so I will preface this by saying, if you have not watched/played or even experienced the horror gaming franchise and are choosing to enter the film without any knowledge of the games, you will not enjoy this film.
FNAF was a moderately scary film, with mostly jump scares to break the quiet tension, so, looking at FNAF 2, I expected the fear factor to be ramped up a bit more, especially with the introduction of the FNAF 2 animatronics.
Which, in my opinion, are scarier than the first four, but even with a scarier lineup of animatronics, the scares and the fear factor fall flat, the loud noises are still apparent, and the kills in this film are still off-screen, which makes it really frustrating to fear these animatronics.
I wish they ramped up the scares in this sequel, specifically the action with the animatronics, but since they're robots/puppets, it’s hard to have them do the things they do in the games, like Foxy jumping into the screen.
Though the animatronics themselves are great and look amazing again, one addition to the cast made me question why they were there.
As for the voices, Megan Fox playing Toy Chica sounded absolutely amazing, Kellen Goff playing Toy Freddy was scary, and FNAF’s favourite theorist, Matthew Patrick, played Toy Bonnie in a very surprising way.
As for the story itself, William Afton haunts the narrative of this film, and I’m not talking about him as a character.
William Afton’s presence in this film is so obviously an addition by Scott Cawthon, who is the sole writer on this project, and it shows.
Since the games, Scott Cawthon has never been able to piece the games together correctly; it’s always felt like an incorrect puzzle where most pieces fit, but there are parts that don’t fit and the same is included here.
You can tell Cawthon wanted to add a lot of pieces from the lore into this film, which, to me as a fan, was great, but it very much gives me the vibe of a requel (remake-sequel) made way too soon and not to mention the ending (which I obviously cannot talk about)
There also weren’t as many kills as I had hoped, and to really measure how many there were, you can count on your hands how many kills there are.
The movie wasn’t entirely bad.
There are good parts that I enjoyed, and this, to me personally, was better than the first, but overall, it feels like this film is a restart to a trilogy that is almost complete.
Unless they do two more films, I honestly don’t know how they will end the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie franchise.