Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 takes place one year after the first film, where the stories that have been somewhat publicised from that movie have somehow been turned into some sort of “cultish legend”, which leads to the creation of the town’s first Fazfest (which is basically a celebration of everything Five Nights at Freddy’s). Abby, the main younger sister from the first one, is inspired to reconnect with her animatronic friends, and in turn, creates a series of crazy events. With this, many dark secrets are revealed about the original horror behind the restaurant that has been hidden from the public for decades.

And this was the first time that I can ever remember walking out of the theater from the movie, and actually being mad at the movie for wasting my time. First off, the plot makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, especially if you are like me and aren’t very familiar with the games. It is constantly trying to tie several things together, and none of them make any sense at all, and come out of seemingly nowhere most of the time. With this, there are a lot of flashbacks and visions that also attempt to do both this and add some emotional depth to a few characters, but they aren’t impactful in any meaningful way at all because the film didn’t care to do the groundwork to make them that way.

On top of that, there were just several weird choices made in the writing that didn’t go anywhere. The first one has to do with Mckenna Grace and a group of her friends at the beginning. I’m not going to go into spoilers, but the scene with them at the beginning ends in a way that makes it seem like it’s going to be a big problem for the rest of the duration, or at least, the end of the film, and it’s really not at all. Also, why was Matthew Lillard reunited with Skeet Ulrich from the first Scream movie, only for the movie to do absolutely nothing with that?

The acting and dialogue were nothing to write home about in the first Five Nights at Freddy’s, and somehow, they managed to make it worse in just about every single way. I couldn’t take literally any of the actors seriously, as the ones like Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail clearly knew they were in a bad movie, while the rest of the cast was the complete opposite, creating this kind of funny disconnect between the cast. When it comes to the dialogue, it’s even more egregious. I could have probably counted at least twenty to thirty times where a line was delivered, and I don’t even know if it was just the writing or the delivery that was the problem, but I had to stop myself from chuckling in the theater. It made the really dumb characters seem even more dumb.

My main criticism of the first film was that the animatronics weren’t even scary in the first place. The design of them was cool, but the way they were written, and especially the way the characters interacted with them in the most chill way possible, made it really hard for me to feel any sort of intimidation factor from them. That problem is far, far worse in the sequel. It has all of those problems that I just mentioned, but along with that, the design of them was overly goofy and silly. Even the way that they talked was that way. I get that it’s accurate to at least one of the games in the series, but I would have much rather just had them stuck with the original, classic designs. Adding onto that, all of the scares are heavily reliant on cheap jump scares, and really no tension at all.

The worst thing by far, though, about Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is the character of Abby (the younger sister I mentioned earlier). Now, so as not to create a Jar Jar situation, I have to first point out that the blame is all on the writing department, and not in any way on the young actress herself or her performance, as she was completely fine in the film. Her character, though, was anything but. She was such an obnoxious and nonsensical character that literally every time she was onscreen, I took the movie even less seriously. It continues this sort of bond and friendship storyline carried on from the first movie that she has with the animatronics, and it’s by far and away the most ridiculous part of the entire story, which is why I saved this part for towards the end of my review. On top of that, she makes so many incredibly frustrating and outrageous decisions that make eleven-year-olds look like complete idiots. Another ridiculous thing, however, is that the series of events that she creates that are tied to the overall premise of this movie actually get people killed! How am I supposed to be rooting for this character, when the writing of her makes almost literally every mistake you could possibly make when writing a character?

The last thing I wanted to talk about isn’t necessarily tied to the overall quality of the film or anything like that, but something I wanted to mention nonetheless. The original Five Nights at Freddy’s movie was a PG-13 horror movie that I would say, despite all of its flaws with everything else story-related, did a pretty good job at creating a movie that pushed it enough in the horror department to be entertaining enough for adults, but definitely didn’t go too far for kids, or, kids that were bold enough to play the games or were fans of it. The sequel, however-who is this for? It’s way too silly and incomprehensible for adults to enjoy, but at the same time, it pushes its PG-13 way too far when it comes to violence, so I would say it probably wouldn’t be nearly as safe a bet to take your kid to. In particular, there is a scene that, while it doesn’t show anything, you clearly know what happens, and it’s extremely violent and not subtle whatsoever with its graphic sound effects.

Somehow, I believe that this is the first movie that I’ve ever given a full review of, where I had absolutely nothing positive that I could think of to say about it, along with it being the first movie that I can recall actually making me mad after watching it and putting me in a bad mood afterwards. I was expecting a bad movie with its 13% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time, and somehow, it managed to go even lower than my expectations by quite a significant amount. Easily my least favorite movie of 2025, and the fact that a threequel is inevitable at this point is honestly just sad.