By Nick Nitkowski 

He’s back! After the financial success of the first “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie, based on the popular jump-scare horror game, earning a worldwide box office of $131 million against a $20 million budget, it was only a matter of time until the screens were graced with the presence of Freddy Fazbear and his friends again. However, despite its financial success, the movie was not received well by critics with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 33% Rotten as of today. With Freddy’s return to the big screen with “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2”, can he manage to satisfy both the fans and the critics this time around?

This latest installment once again followers Mike Schmidt, played again by Josh Hutcherson, who is still doing his best to take care of his little sister Abby, played again by Piper Rubio, who longs to see her animatronic friends again while his friend Vanessa, played again by Elizabeth Lail, is still trying to cope with her past trauma of her heritage. But when Abby is called upon by her friends, she finds herself in the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, where a new evil lurks within the famous animatronics.

I myself managed to have a good time watching the first “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie despite the fact that I’m not a fan of the game in the sense that I never played it myself, but I always enjoyed watching the reaction videos and gameplays on YouTube. It was far from perfect, but I did have fun watching it, and I can tell that it catered to the fans of the franchise. With “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2”, there were still a lot of fun moments found here. But in my honest opinion, this latest addition felt like a bit of a step down from the first film.

Starting off with the positives, I absolutely love that they continue to utilize practical effects with the animatronics. There’s a special thing when you can see the practical effects on screen. It makes it more real than if they chose to use CGI. CGI rarely, if ever, manages to capture a fraction of the magic that practical effects can provide. All of the animatronics looked great, and a lot of them were genuinely very menacing to look at.  

There’s also a scene in the movie that caters to fans of the game, which I did find to be enjoyable. While I never played the games, I knew the fundamentals and elements on how to play them, and this particular scene was very reminiscent of the gameplay of the second game. I just remember thinking, “I like how they manage to weave that into the movie.” I’m sure fans are going to greatly appreciate that scene in the movie a lot. No question about it.

Now, onto the negatives. The pacing of this movie felt very uneven. It somehow managed to feel both too long and too short at the same time. With a runtime of an hour and forty-four minutes, the beginning of the film tends to drag its feet, and then, by the end, the film is suddenly racing to the finish line. So much so that when the movie ends, it felt very abrupt. Obviously, this is to set up an inevitable third installment, but it didn’t feel like an actual ending for a movie and kind of left a bad taste when it cut to black.

I also didn’t like how some of the characters acted. You obviously have to have your cannon fodder for the animatronics to take out in glorious PG-13 fashion for the enjoyment of us, the sadistic audience, but a lot of the characters made very obvious bad choices. It’s like we’ve gone back in time to the classic horror movie tropes where the audience gets so frustrated by what they’re seeing that they feel the strongest need to shout at the characters on the screen to simply make a common-knowledge decision that any normal, rational think person would do only for those characters to choose the dumbest possible option that no one would actually do in that particular situation. So, yeah. That got on my nerves a little bit.

Needless to say, if you are a fan of the ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s” franchise, you are undoubtedly going to have a great time with “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2”. But if you are not a fan of the franchise, then I can easily see this movie being a struggle for you to get through. As someone who is pretty much a middle-of-the-road fan, I thought that this movie could have been a lot better than what it ended up being. Even the bad-decision-making tropes could have been written better to cater to more than just fans. But I also give great praise for the practical animatronics in the film. I do think that this is a step down from the first film, which to some critics is already a low bar. But I also know that my words will not sway anyone either way. Fans will show up for it, it will be successful, and we will be back again for a third film regardless of what anyone has to say about this movie. But as it stands for myself, I will most likely forget most of this movie in approximately Five Nights or so.

2 stars