At the tail end of last year, we were blessed with the ever-frightful “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” film, a sequel to the 2023 Blumhouse Productions film that had internet nerds and cringe connoisseurs in a chokehold. I treat these movies like major cultural events, mainly for nostalgia factor, so you better believe that I was going to be tuning into an adaptation of my favorite “FNAF” game!
I’m not one to pay too much attention to critics’ takes, but the harsh reception of this movie was so unwarranted. I won’t say that this is definitively my favorite horror-ish film, but I am one of the last people who will be unrelentingly mean to what the writers and director had in mind when adapting the beloved second installment in this decade-old video game franchise.
Yes, I am standing my ground as a defender and enjoyer of this movie…semi-ironically! Like the first movie, “FNAF 2” excels at unsettling ambience and dreary color palettes. I loved how they adapted the aesthetics of Fazbear’s Pizza restaurant and gave us a real feel of the play areas from the second game. I’m someone with an eye for aesthetics, and this movie nails it, from the first 10 minutes featuring Vanessa’s (Elizabeth Lail) friend Charlotte getting murdered to Vanessa’s disorienting dream sequence.
Also, for being a PG-13 “horror” movie, I was impressed by how they really pushed the limits of that rating with how much more gore is in this film. In the first film, my biggest issue was that the horror left a lot to be desired, and I wanted so many more slight off-screen deaths. This second film, though? Let’s just say that one of the animatronics isn’t afraid to pop someone’s head like a grape and brush it off with a silly quip just seconds later.
Speaking of animatronics, can I just give huge props to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for, yet again, producing the most scarily realistic designs for these characters? In this movie, we get new sets of animatronics, with toy and withered versions, and to say they look like 1-to-1 replicas of the video game designs would be a severe understatement. And can we talk about the Marionette for a brief moment? Its design is unmistakably fantastic, and the way it slithered around in some scenes gave me the heebiest of jeebies!
As much as I do enjoy this film, its aesthetics and its references to fandom memes that I didn’t even get to mention, I notice there are a few things that hold it back. Listen, I still enjoyed Hunger Games heartthrob Josh Hutcherson as Mike Schmidt; his character, however, frustrated me more than I thought it would. I understand that Mike wants to move on from the acid-trip occurrences of the first movie, but in the process, he just deludes himself into thinking everything can go back to normal in an instant, when that’s not the reality for his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and especially Vanessa.
At times, he completely dismisses her more traumatic moments, like remembering her monster of a father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard). I just felt like his character has some kind of empathy deficiency, and that becomes apparent at the very end. I honestly really disliked this movie’s ending because of how jarring Mike’s attitude towards Vanessa is.
Also, the plot falls flat in some areas. I don’t really care much for the side plots or stories that are hammered into the first 30 minutes of the film. It reminded me of “The Minecraft Movie,” a movie I ironically enjoyed but was painfully bored with during the beginning, before we get to mining and crafting.
Another problem that the film has is insanely underutilizing characters, as is the case with Michael Afton (Freddy Carter), Vanessa’s brother and William’s son. You have William Afton’s literal SON, who takes after his father in the eerie department with his odd speech patterns and static facial expressions, and you’re not going to utilize him beyond two scenes? Aside from Michael, the withered animatronics, as insanely horrifying as they look, barely get their time to shine, too. I get that the movie is more focused on the toy versions (Chica, an alarming amount!), but I think they could’ve squeezed just one more scene with the withered ones.
The “FNAF 2” movie isn’t trying to be anything more than a fantastical adaptation of the second “FNAF” game, and I think it’s important to remember that. It’s a movie that really is for the fans, fans like me who loved “FNAF” in middle school and have been keeping up with the IP on and off since then.
If I could tell sixth-grade Fatimah that her favorite “FNAF” game would get such a faithful adaptation, I think she would be ecstatic before blasting The Living Tombstone’s “It’s Been So Long” through her cheap wired earbuds. Check it out, and pray you don’t grow an aversion to music boxes the way I did when watching this movie!
6.5/10
