The problem with any kind of long running IP is when you get to a certain point in your universe, there’s always that danger that your product will end up getting tangled up in impossibly convoluted lore. Now, this isn’t so much a problem if you’re a die hard fan – in fact, it probably enhances the experience more to know that you can crack years of continuity when casual viewers run into like a brick wall – but usually it takes a fair few installments to get to such a complex level.
It was fairly impressive then, that the film adaptation of cult video game Five Nights At Freddy’s, managed cram so much of its famously stacked plots into a single film, but as someone who had no real familiarity with the source material, I personally felt like someone who had never seen an MCU movie in my life bring forced to take an in-depth Marvel exam only after a single viewing of Avengers: Infinity War. Well, it seems like the test isn’t quite over yet as the inevitable Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 has now been served up to add even scattered toppings on an already cluttered pizza. Will this second adventure for the anti-social animatronics offer some blessed clarity, or will we have to once again listen to the sound of a movie once again trying not to choke to death on its own lore?
It’s 2002, and after their run-in with the possessed mascots of the Freddy Fazbear Pizza chain, Mike Schmidt and his sister Abby are trying to move past that fateful night. Similarly, Vanessa Shelly, the daughter of child murdering Fazbear proprietor, William Afton, is also trying to put her life back together despite hallucinating wildly a spin class about the fact that her father not only slaughtered children (including Mike’s brother), but stuffed their bodies into the animatronic mascots of the food chain which eventually became haunted. However, as complex as all that is, it turns out that that’s not even the end of the horrific history of Freddy Fazbear. You see, a handy flashback reveals that Afton had been up to his murderous tricks before vack in 1982, in the very first branch of the pizza place when a young girl, Charlotte Emily, is killed after walking in on him as he indulges in his monstrous hobby.
As we all know by now, anyone who seems to meet their end in the titular restaurant finds that their restless spirit is doomed to become connected with one of the many colourful characters and the withdrawn Charlotte finds herself fused with her favorite one, the Marionette. Meanwhile, a depressed Abby misses her murdered child possessed restaurant robots and yearns to go back and repair them, but after communicating with Freddy, Chica and the gang on a Fazbear branded Speak & Spell, she heads out to restore her misunderstood buddies only to discover that another ghostly conspiracy has put her in its sights. With all sorts of clunking animatronics stomping around the place and the Marionette plotting a horrible revenge, can Mike, Vanessa and Abby make it through another eatery-based ordeal in one piece?
So, as an utter newbie to the world of Five Nights At Freddy’s, I have to confess that I wasn’t particularly enthralled with it for various reasons, but the main one was the film’s insistence of piling on the lore from the games to the point where what should have been a fun, cat-and-mouse stalkathon involving robot animals became something of an overcomplicated chore. Yet, while trying to wade through that plot became oddly hard work, there were some plus points I could cling to with the main one being that the monstrous animatronics being skillfully pulled off for realsies by the Jim Henson Creature Shop. However, as we head into the sequel, any hopes that the filmmakers might have ironed out the plot in order to help non-fans seems to have fallen on deaf eyes and, if anything, returning director Emma Tammi strives to make things even more complicated.
At first, it simply seems that the plot is solely going to centre around the possessed form of the Marionette, a Tim Burton meets No Face from Spirited Away looking thing that looks like the last thing you’d want floating above you while you ear pizza with your family. Bizarre aesthetic choices aside (Freddy Fazbears was run by a serial killer after all), the decision to go with a full blown possession story makes it initially seem as if the sequel is attempting to go down a far different path than fully utilising those iconic, clanking robots, however, as the minutes tick by, Five Nights At Freddy’s adds more and more needless details to its frame until the story can barely move for all the narrative bulk.
A subplot featuring Mckenna Grace’s team of online ghost spotters is quickly done away with, while another that suggests that the closed down restaurants have inexplicably inspired a meta festival named FazFest that’s barely utilised. Elsewhere we have Wayne Knight’s needlessly cruel robotics teacher and some guff about him picking on Abby because he believes she’ll stop the school winning some science award for the fourth year in a row (gripping, I know) and the marauding animatronics aren’t even piloted by the ghosts of dead kids anymore as these new “toy” versions are instead remotely controlled by the Marionette herself. Bit while the film insists on cramming all this new stuff in, it attempts to half-heartedly keep up all the dangling threads left over from the first film.
However, in the onslaught of new stuff and the rebranding of the old stuff (there’s now three versions of the main Fazbear gang now), everything concerning Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio and Elizabeth Lail’s leads is half-heartedly delivered in a mess of clunky dialogue.
Worst of all, the main reason Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 struggles so much to present a coherent story is because yet more of its runtime it ruthlessly given away trying to shamelessly hype up a probable Five Nights At Freddy’s 3 in a way that make the early, foreshadowing attempts of Iron Man 2 seem positively subtle in comparison. Skeet Urich pops up to offer a possible Scream reunion with Matthew Lillard only to deliver tearful exposition in a single scene and numerous threads, hints, warnings and cliff hangers are left fully unresolved which make me think the Blumhouse didn’t learn from the underperformance of M3GAN 2.0. However, I will say that when the film allows Freddy and friends to simply strut their stuff, the movie does admittedly become fairly watchable, although the films still haven’t explained why the hulking machines are able to sneak up on everyone despite having footfalls that sound like the ED-209 has put a bit of weight on.
Shamelessly pandering to the fanbase at every chance it gets (is Megan Fox voicing Chica a fan casting or something?) and happily jettisoning coherence in favour of cheap jump scares and endless set ups for another sequel, Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 may know it’s audience, but it does so at the expense at anyone simply wanting to watch a cool, killer ghost/robot/mascot movie without having to scribble down extensive cram notes first. Probably a big win for the fans, at this rate, the rest of us will need to have a PHD in Fazbear-ology to even understand the third one.
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