Five Night’s at Freddy’s 2 (2025) - Movie Review

The best thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 was the marketing materials.

What if I told you that a movie based on one of the most interesting stories ever hidden in a video game may have ruined the franchise for me permanently?

What if I told you that a sequel with a higher budget and more elaborate special effects somehow felt cheaper than the shoestring budget original?

Oh, you’re not surprised.

You saw the Blumhouse logo on the poster, didn’t you?

Let’s discuss.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a 2025 sci-fi/horror film brought to us by director Emma Tammi and series creator/writer Scott Cawthon. Both performed the same functions in the 2023 original, but with the help of writer Seth Cuddeback. I find it odd that both Cuddeback and Tammi co-wrote the original film but had no writing input on the sequel. I know that Cawthon, as the sole owner of the property, has full control under a Stephen King-like contractual clause in all rights agreements for FNAF, but this is an extreme change.

This film feels like AI wrote it.

While the entire cast returns along with new additions, Skeet Ulrich and Wayne Knight, none of the characters behave like themselves. It’s as if the second film reset their personalities to where they started in the first. Whereas at the end of the first film, brother and sister Mike and Abby are united, reconciled via anamotronic trauma, and Vanessa joins their family unit after rejecting her father’s evil machinations. She came clean to Mike, and in doing so, opened Mike’s heart to trust people again. It’s a happy ending with an ominous hook at the end, much like a Goosebumps story.

This film lacks the heart of the original, and while it wasn’t true to the story of the games, it set a decent foundation in a new continuity. The first film had likeable characters, a scary villain, and some fun setpiece moments. It wasn’t Chinatown, but it was a fun popcorn movie that felt good-intentioned. This sequel takes all of that goodwill and throws it out the window.

I have a feeling Tamm and Cuddeback had no interest in being credited as contributing to this script once they completed the first table read. I feel like they Alan Smithy’d themselves off the IMDB listing.

This is a cash grab, plain and simple. Thanks, Blumhouse.

None of the characters behaves like themselves, and no one in this film gives off any positive energy. Hutchison definitely sleepwalks through this movie and gives off the vibe that he would rather be shooting anything else. They relegate his character to doing stupid gags and sequences to shoehorn in references to the games. His character is just a cardboard cut-out of the original film’s protagonist, with none of the growth. It doesn’t help that Emma, his little sister in the film, is supposedly an 11-year-old genius, but she behaves like a five-year-old. The kid was nearly killed the year prior, and somehow has developed no street smarts or sense of self-preservation. Speaking from experience, as a child who was the victim of an attempted kidnapping and still struggles with the PTSD from it, you get old quickly when you face adversity and terror at that level, and her character lacks any of that depth.

Every scene is just a setup for a setpiece that utterly disappoints.

Nothing happens in this movie to move the story forward. There really isn’t a story. A new location is introduced, a new villain steps forward, but it all lands like a wet fart. Similar to the worst-reviewed film of all time on the site, 2024’s Tarot, stereotypes just happen. There’s no character motivation other than base instincts, but even then, no one acts human.

I’m not blaming the actors. They knew the script was shit. They definitely tried, especially Elizabeth Lail as Vanessa. Of all the actors, she comes off as the one desperately trying to make something of the horrible shit that was dumped on the cast. Sometimes, a good director could pivot and tweak things to improve a film with bad writing, but that leads to another problem. The directing AND the editing in the film are terrible. There’s no stakes, no build-up, and every scene feels like an absolute mess. There’s no central focus in many scenes. The camera just kind of sits there or bounces around like a ship in a storm. Maybe it was an attempt at emulating the gonzo, handheld camera work to imitate the games, but it also failed miserably.

Jim Henson Company did amazing with the animatronics and puppets. Flawless execution on the SFX teams overall. I’m just sorry all their hard work went into a movie that has already been forgotten.

Cawthon has betrayed his audience.

Scott Cawthon created this series and the amazing story hidden within the games, but his refusal to tell that story in a firm narrative has hamstrung these movies, as well as the newer entries in the game series. If they had told the actual story, in continuity, it wouldn’t matter as much to the audience how bad the dialogue is, because the kids who grew up playing the games would have the nostalgia, the experience of having played the scene on screen, and getting to see the story that Youtubers Game Theory and Wendigoon have made public. If Cawthon’s excuse is not wanting to ruin the game and the mystery within, he shouldn’t have made Pizzaria Simulator, which confirmed all the fan theories and ended the original timeline. I watched this with my 9-year-old daughter, as she is a huge fan of the FNAF game series, but she was sorely disappointed. I thought she was walking away because she was scared, but it was because she was bored. The changes to the story were too extreme and ill-advised that even a die-hard FNAF player and collector tuned it out.

This movie makes a 1-hour and 44-minute runtime feel like three hours.

The film drags, and the attempts at humor make it feel even longer. Scenes go on far too long, and nothing hits. Things happen, but none of it matters. I would have turned it off halfway through, but I needed to do the review. I soldiered on, only to find that the ending of the movie isn’t an ending at all. It’s a lame, to-be-continued, as if the film had been broken up into multiple films ala the Deathly Hallows.

It’s another poor decision on top of all the other poor choices made in the production of this absolute dumpster fire. I hope the paycheck bought Jason Blum and Scott Cawthon lots of shiny things, so at least someone got some enjoyment out of watching this.

I cannot emphasize how much you should avoid this garbage movie.

But if you do want to witness the destruction of FNAF’s future endeavors, check it out streaming on PEACOCK.