Five Nights at Freddy's 2: Animatronics Unbound, More In-Jokes for Gamers

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C-plus

In his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, screenwriter William Goldman coined an evergreen mantra about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”

Case in point: 2003’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, about cute-but murderous animatronic cartoony characters at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a family chain very much like Chuck E. Cheese.

It’s a fair guess that billions of dollars have been lost trying to replicate the success of video game franchises, all the way back to 1993’s Super Mario Bros.

So, who expected anything from a mid-low budget film version of a, yes, popular video game, a project that got bounced from one studio to another and was hammered by critics?

To the surprise of everyone but the game-faithful, the $20 million PG horror, whose biggest star is The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson, grossed $300 million worldwide.

I too know nothing, but I have sat through many of the begotten game-based movies over the decades, including the Uwe Bol ones. And I get a sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s and this week’s inevitable salad of a sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, marks a turning point in how Hollywood approaches the visual medium that has been eating its lunch for decades.

The lesson: Stop trying to make video game film adaptations that appeal to a general audience. A giant in-joke of a movie can pay off bigtime if the target audience is big enough. Screw the rest.

And if you add the millions who’ve played the games and its spin-offs, the hundreds of millions who’ve watched theme YouTube videos and god knows how many Reddit threads. Certainly, all the cosplay going on in the audience of an advance screening of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 this week attests to the Gen Z word-of-mouth.

To newbies like me, it may be puzzling when a theatre rocks with laughter when someone squeezes a toy or picks up a music box that plays My Grandfather’s Clock and hands it over as a weapon, or when someone clearly sinister, with a Joker smile, simply says, “My name is Michael.” Or when a new character pops up and the audience cheers. But to those in the know, this is gold.

Aside to the fans: as one who was there, it sounds like this movie clearly rocks.

The first FNAF at least had a singular location to keep some sort of focus on the goings-on. Hutcherson plays Mike, a down-on-his-luck security guard at a now closed Freddy Fazbear’s, just trying to make ends meet as he raises his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio). Murders took place on or off his watch, leading him to meet an investigating cop named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail).

Meanwhile, Abby befriended the animatrons, Freddy, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy, who turned out to be possessed by the ghosts of murdered children.

It all led to a serial killer (Matthew Lillard), who got what was coming to him in the end. Oh, and he turned out to be Vanessa’s dad. Talk about father issues.

But of course, no one really dies in horror movies. Look at that other Freddy (Krueger). Lillard is back, in phantom form, and there’s a whole new entity taking vengeful control of the animatronics and even giving them new, more murderous forms.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 takes place in two defunct locations of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza (it was a chain after all), which splits the focus even before the animatronics figure out a way to leave their “home” and wreak havoc on the city (which has perversely turned the murders at Freddy’s into a civic event called FazFest).

To that end, they lure Abby back to her “friends” and trick her into turning off the computer lock that keeps them in place.

All of which turns Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 into a random series of plot twists and random killings. For my demographic, it’s best enjoyed by sitting back and watching cute faced robots crush people’s heads (no blood though, a PG rating is key to maximizing access to Freddy’s fandom).

And for what it’s worth, most of the last act is a brazen set-up for Freddy’s 3. Glad to be the bearer of good news for the fans.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. Directed by Emma Tammi. Written by Scott Cawthon. Stars Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio and Elizabeth Lail. Opens in theatres, Friday, December 5.