Five Nights at Freddy's 2 review: This boilerplate sequel should be more funny and more frightening

It’s an oft-observed rule in horror that when a character is described as having been left for dead, the sentence’s key words are “left for” – as countless resurrections of Halloween’s Michael Myers and Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees will testify.

Doors are conveniently left ajar for further instalments, should the filmmakers and/or their financiers believe there’s a big enough market, and in the case of this second visit to the freakish Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza emporium the initial movie’s global box office take of nearly $300 million made the decision a shoo-in.

It found favour with cinema-goers, despite mixed to negative reviews critical of both a diluting of the more violent source video game series and an overly convoluted plot – yet, while the first of those concerns is partially addressed by comparatively grislier action this time around, the script doubles down on unnecessary confusion, hopping from one scenario to another as if written by a child with a low attention span.

The bad guys springing back to life are, of course, the titular Freddy and his similarly animatronic pals at the abandoned pizzeria; deactivated or disassembled when we last saw them, malevolent influences conspire to reboot the toy-town terminator terrors.

Once again, they exercise a sinister pull on the franchise’s core human trio of mild-mannered security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson), his precocious younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and plucky police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), none having learned much of lesson after being scarred (Vanessa, literally) by their previous skirmishes with cartoon robots possessed by missing children.

The events take place a year later, focusing on an upturn in fascination with the Freddy’s brand that manifests itself in Halloween costumes, school science fair projects, and the attentions of a young team of paranormal investigators (in a very Scooby-Doo van) led by McKenna Grace, the actress taking a short stroll from the spook-chasing antics of her character in the most recent brace of Ghostbusters outings.

Also fresh to the Freddy film orbit from the game series is The Marionette (previously known as The Puppet), an evildoer with a character design that comes perilously close to infringing on a Tim Burton copyright, but while genuinely menacing, it’s employed frustratingly too little.

Therein lies the bugbear at the heart of Freddy’s 2, the returning pair of director Emma Tammi and screenwriter (and original game creator) Scott Cawthon rarely standing still long enough to give the scattergun narrative a semblance of structure.

Characters crop up early in proceedings and then disappear for an hour or so, but are so lightly drawn to start with it runs the risk of viewers having forgotten them by the time they’re back on screen – a particularly worrying flaw when one of them turns out to have had a major say in the ensuing mayhem.

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Occasionally, the scares are tiresomely boilerplate (does every modest-sized house in small town America have a creepy, really long dark corridor?), the stuff of a horror yarn starter kit that ticks boxes instead of building suspense.

Wayne Knight (also new to the series) has a decent enough supporting role as Abby’s ruthless, success-driven science teacher, making more of his brief-ish appearances than any of the leads can muster, none of whom are helped by hokey dialogue, like Mike telling Vanessa “you’ll never be free from your dad until you deal with the mess he left in your head".

A tech wiz he may be, but Cawthon is a far from gifted wordsmith, his self-referential whimsy bordering on smug when he has Mike, struggling with the controls to take charge of the pizzeria’s computer system, say “what kind of idiot designed this place?”

Considering the premise, plus the visual comportment and countenance of its villains, both Freddy’s 2 and its predecessor are curiously bereft of humour, the very few laughs limited chiefly to sight gags or five-second cameos alluding to the earlier movie.

It should be funnier, it should be more frightening, and it needed everyone involved to bring a feistier game to a film that began life as, well, a game. Here’s hoping any future reservation at the deathly diner has a more mouth-watering menu.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is released in UK cinemas on Friday 5th December 2025.

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