Take 46: Five Nights at Freddy 2

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 opens 20 years earlier with a brave young girl, intervenes in the abduction of a boy at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Though she saves the boy, it does it end well for her. Fast forward 20 years where we find former security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) keeping the secret of what happened to his 11 years old sister’s animatronic friends a year ago in the last film. When she tries to repair her animatronic friends, secrets are revealed involving the true origin of Freddy’s and a new, bizarre string of murderous robotic menaces.

The casting is fine, but the coolest thing about it is it reunites Matthew Lillard as William Afton and Skeet Ulrich as Henry and, even though they never share any screen time together, the fact that they starred in Scream is a cool nod for a horror film and they are now playing father-roles. Not much of note otherwise. Everyone was totally fine.

Now the story itself. Boy, do I have questions. First of all, we ARE in the era of the sequel. Just about every single movie out right now is a derivative of something else: Wicked for Good, Zootopia 2, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, Jujusu Kaiser: Execution (no familiar with it, but apparently it’s the third opener of a series.) Pickings were slim for what my schedule would allow, so I took a gamble here, hoping enough would be recapped and explained over the course of the film. Whoops. This is Day of at Friday’s for me. I definitely felt out of the loop for most of this. With every revelation, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was witnessing new information of was this something I would have totally known had I seen the first. It didn’t really take away much from the overall experience, but I felt like I was playing catching up the whole time which may or not have been the case. Look, I grew up with the Stan Lee mantra for comics books: treat every issue like it’s someone’s first.

After the intro, I was expecting the some kick-@$$ female character representation. Charlotte was bold and fearless. Vanessa was a cop for crying out loud. Unfortunately, she kinda fell flat after that. She wasn’t particularly dynamic. She definitely didn’t save the day. She was just kinda there. Oh well…

Another thing that threw me was the intended tone. Who exactly was the audience? Yeah, it’s a horror film and it was definitely dark in parts, but I just couldn’t get past these goofy animatronics, despite how scary there were supposed go to be. Surely they were shooting for campy, right? If som, it missed the mark for me. It wasn’t played campy enough to be that funny and it wasn’t horrific enough to be scary. Not a single jump scare landed for me. Shame on me for not being read up on the books (apparently this IS a young readers series.) This was confirmed when I heard the family behind me comment on how much “scarier” it was than the first so it looks like maybe that WAS the target audience and for them it DID work, so good for them!

I feel like I have been a bit harsh in my review. I actually DID enjoy it. Was it a little predictable? Sure. But I did add myself to the request list at work for the first one right after seeing it because I am curious enough to see how much I missed and how it fits in with this one. I am sure I will have a greater appreciation for it upon future viewings. But for now, I’m thinking a 7.2.GV2

Did you enjoy your time with Freddy? Tell me about it in the comments. And until next time…