Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Plays Like a Machine, Not a Movie

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2

★ ★

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is the sequel to the surprise hit film adaptation of the popular video game. The game has more than 20 titles in the franchise, including sequels, spin-offs and downloadable content. The first film loosely followed the original game. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) gets a job as a security guard at a rundown Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza—a nod to the 1980s glory days of Chuck E. Cheese’s. At Fazbear’s, animatronic bears, ducks and other large, rather creepy, robotic figures entertain kids as they eat cardboard pizza and celebrate someone’s birthday. While Mike watches security cameras and does his rounds, animatronics come to life and try to kill him.

In this outing, we start in the past, with a girl named Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie), who doesn’t want to be part of her friend’s birthday party at Fazbear’s. She feels like an outcast and is fixated on a particular animatronic: The Marionette.

McKenna Grace as Lisa
© 2025 Universal Pictures

Why anyone would put The Marionette in a kid’s pizza parlor is beyond me. It bears a striking resemblance to Jigsaw in the Saw franchise. The Marionette is supposed to come out of a trap door and do a little dance on stage. If that thing came out while I was at that birthday party, I’d drop my pizza in my friend’s lap and run like hell.

Charlotte sees one of the animatronics grab a boy and take him to the restaurant’s service hallway. She pleads with adults to help the boy. But these adults are astonishingly useless and she can’t get a single one to investigate with her. So she takes it upon herself, saves the boy and is captured by The Marionette.

An animatronic nightmare
© 2025 Universal Pictures

We jump ahead a couple years to Mike, his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and Mike’s friend Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) getting on with their lives after their last battle with animatronics from the first film. Mike wants to date Vanessa and Abby is trying to win a science fair. When she can’t get her robot to work right, she tries to find her animatronic “friends” to help her.

Of course, The Marionette will be there waiting.

I found the first film to be far more interesting. There, we discovered the animatronics were controlled by the spirits of dead children who didn’t know where to place their vengeance.

Josh Hutcherson as Mike
© 2025 Universal Pictures

This isn’t a scary film, though the filmmakers do their darndest to scare us out of our seats with “it’s-just-a-cat” jump scares you could sense from a mile away. After the third time the scary music defibrillates us into tachycardia, we’re on to the ruse and it loses its effectiveness.

The writing is basic and relies heavily on manufactured drama in which the script forces a specific scenario to make a plot twist work. The acting is wooden and uninspired, which waters down our sympathy when the monsters get really riled up and go in for the kill.

Elizabeth Lail as Vanessa
© 2025 Universal Pictures

It’s certainly not a great film, but neither was the one before it. The first outing seemed to understand that it was a story about killer animatronics living inside an all-but-condemned birthday party pizzeria. This film tries to take things a bit too seriously but doesn’t fully give us a compelling reason to care. I imagine it’s similar to how the pizza would be at Fazbear’s Pizza, were it a real joint: a bit like cardboard, not awful, just shy of kinda good.