Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (dir. Emma Tammi)
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 104 mins
UK Distributor: Universal Pictures
UK Release Date: 5 December 2025
WHO’S IN FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2?
Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Theodus Crane, Skeet Ulrich, Mckenna Grace, Teo Briones, Freddy Carter, Wayne Knight, Kellen Goff, Megan Fox, Matthew Patrick, Audrey Lynn Marie
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Emma Tammi (director), Scott Cawthorn (writer, producer), Jason Blum (producer), The Newton Brothers (composers), Lyn Moncrief (cinematographer), Timothy Alverson and Derek Larsen (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
The possessed animatronics of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza return for more violence…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2?
With Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Blumhouse had one simple job: to make something that was at least a little better than the first one. That movie, which of course brought the hugely popular video game franchise to the big screen after years of on-and-off development, may have made one hell of a profit with its $20 million budget (making it the highest-grossing film in the history of producer Jason Blum’s production company) but completely failed to scare or even mildly titillate audiences who weren’t well-versed in the games and its extremely lucrative lore. Hopefully, a sequel could actually learn a thing or two and actually give wider audiences something that didn’t feel as though it could have gotten by with a PG certificate instead of an overblown 15.
Oh, how naïve I was to think that Blumhouse had any kind of ambition with this franchise. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is somehow worse than its already terrible predecessor, with its obscene lack of scares hardly being the most glaring flaw in a movie that is extremely convoluted, poorly crafted, awkwardly performed, and worst of all not even entertainingly bad but boringly so.
The film, also directed by Emma Tammi, opens with a brief 80s-set prologue showing a young girl named Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie) becoming the latest victim of William Afton (Matthew Lillard, one of only two actors who appear to be having any kind of fun in this movie), the serial killer moonlighting as the owner of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza and its various animatronics that we now know is where he’s hidden the bodies and souls of his child victims. This section alone really sets you up for what you’re in store for, from stilted acting to monotonous dialogue to things that make absolutely no sense – none of the adults are remotely non-plussed when someone approaches them about an abducted child, while the child’s very public and blatantly obvious stab wounds are declared an “accident” – all while going out of its way to be as non-scary as possible.
Flashforward to twenty years later (which took me a second to remember that both this and the first film took place in the 2000s and not the present day), and we pick up on former security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) trying to get over the horrors at Freddy Fazbear’s, with Abby in particular mourning her new friends within the possessed animatronics. Soon, Abby receives a message from the original Freddy Fazbear’s location, where she’s summoned to seemingly help free them from the parameters of the building, but of course it’s all the work of a much more sinister force that Mike, along with former cop and Afton’s daughter Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), must contain before it can cause serious harm.
Except, at no point in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 does the word “harm” even come close to describing the range of terror these characters experience. Like the first film, this is an extremely tame horror that seems to be made almost exclusively for children, acting as some sort of gateway into the far more creative and terrifying world of horror cinema. But although this one tries a couple of times to be scary (and never succeeding, but at least it’s trying), it is so much more distracting in how it is actively hiding the violence and keeping the scares to an absolute minimum, to where it almost feels like it’s been severely edited down to show on television. This is a horror where even a person’s skull being crushed (all off-screen, of course) produces just a small splatter of blood, while every jump scare is telegraphed or just completely ineffective, since these animatronics are far more adorable than they are intimidating and nothing scary ever truly happens with them.
Shockingly, even with nearly twice the budget, this movie actually feels cheaper than the first. There are scenes in this movie that seem like they were rushed through production, to where it doesn’t even seem like they had time to properly sort out some of the colour grading, and while the movie boasts some impressive practical animatronics (also one of the first film’s saving graces) they have such a stiff and unrefined look about them which makes it less believable whenever they’re somehow sneaking up on people despite what have to be heavy clanking metal all over their bodies. The only things stiffer are the human actors, many of whom – aside from Lillard and Wayne Knight, who is delightfully wicked as an impossibly mean schoolteacher – go through the entire movie as though they’d rather be anywhere else, under such lethargic direction by Tammi that similarly feels like it’s not being paid anywhere close enough to care.
There isn’t much of a plot or even stakes, as the majority of this script by series creator Scott Cawthon is dedicated to long-winded exposition that goes into excessive detail surrounding the Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, all set to some terrible dialogue that makes what should be a great foundation for a horror film into even more of a sluggish exercise. It fails to capitalise on any of its potential, with even the introduction of a “FazFest” event with hundreds of potential victims never coming into fruition, the film stopping dead with an anticlimactic tease for a third film that provides the scariest aspect of this movie: the prospect of more movies in this franchise.
It’s just amazing to me that we’ve now had two Five Nights at Freddy’s movies, and neither of them have been better than Willy’s Wonderland. That Nicolas Cage-starring knockoff isn’t even any good itself, but it still managed to deliver as best as it could the core concept of possessed animatronics going around killing people in gruesome and over-the-top ways. Yet Blumhouse, with its ability to make films for around or even twice as much as that film cost to make, has managed to screw up twice with all the wrong elements put into something that’s clearly just been made because it’s based on a popular franchise, and because people are still talking about them and playing them to this day.
But seriously, just watch a YouTube video of someone playing any of the Five Nights at Freddy’s games instead of watching these movies, because then you’ll at least be mildly entertained and not bored out of your mind.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is somehow worse than its terrible predecessor, doubling down on its perverse lack of scares within a much cheaper-seeming and awkwardly performed production of a convoluted script filled with nonsense and missed opportunities galore, with the only scary thing being its ending tease of more movies in this series.
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