My Review of Five Nights At Freddy's 2 (2025)

 

Written by Scott Cawthon

Directed by Emma Tammi

Michael: "Welcome back, Charlotte."

I'm not sure if this has been the year for horror sequels. Both M3GAN 2.0 and Black Phone 2 felt like misfires to me and I think I can add this one into that pile as well. Aside from the clear cliffhanger to set up a third movie, this felt rather dull to me.

The movie opened with William Afton (Matthew Lillard) killing another young boy and being witnessed by a girl named Charlotte Emily (Audrey Lynn Marie). Charlotte's father, Henry (Skeet Ulrich) would end up playing a role in later events.

Anyways, moving the story to twenty years beyond that, the three survivors from the first movie were trying to get on with their lives. In particular, Abby Schmidt (Piper Rubio) was happy to tell her classmates about the events of the first movie while also preparing for her science project.

Instead of having antagonistic classmates, Abby found herself at the ire of teacher Mr Berg (Wayne Knight). Berg's needlessly cruel to Abby and ended up paying for it when a newly restored Chica (Megan Fox) wanted to see what was in his head. It turned out to be nothing.

As for older brother, Mike (Josh Hutcherson). Well, this movie tried to explore the idea of him maybe dating William's daughter, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) but the trust between the two of them wasn't there. The presence of Vanessa's serial killer brother, Michael (Freddy Carter) didn't help matters either.

I have to say this movie did an incredibly poor job with setting Michael up as a villain as well as the return of Freddy (Kellen Goff) and company along with Abby being too easily manipulated by Chica. Everything about this film screamed a rush job with barely anything given proper time to breathe, story wise.

- Credit scenes include a bunch of delinquents finding William's corpse and Henry leaving a warning for Mike. Charlotte possessed Marionette.

- Jim Henson's Creature Shop provided the animatronics for this movie as they did with the first.

- The reveal about Henry at the end should definitely set up scenes for Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard in the likely third movie.

- Chronology: 1982 for the opening scene and 2002 for the majority of the movie.

I wanted to like Five Nights At Freddy's 2 but I honestly found it very dull, repetitive and poorly handled with it's lore and new villains. This felt very rushed as a sequel and it definitely suffered for it too.

Rating: 5 out of 10