After the first Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, I was actually moderately excited for the sequel. Which makes it even more of a let-down that it is such a steaming pile of utter dogshit.
I know the FNAF series is a kind of franchise-non-grata in a lot of horror circles; for some, it’s a bit toothless, a bit too cynically merchandised, a bit too silly in its lore and execution to really stick, and I don’t neccessarily disagree with those criticisms. But I have a real soft spot for the first few games as a moment in horror history, and the first movie, directed by the brilliant Emma Tammi, is downright serviceable as far as I’m concerned. Does it blow the doors off the genre? No, of course not, but the animatronics look cool, the set design is fun, and the central emotional throughline between Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and Abby (Piper Rubio) sticks the landing where it matters most. With Tammi back for a sequel, how badly wrong could it go, really?
The major difference between this movie and the last one, in terms of production, is the introduction of Scott Cawthon as a sole screenwriter. Cawthon, the man behind the original games, feels like the right choice for this story, at least on paper – who better, after all, to bring it to screen than the person who came up with this world in the first place?
Who better indeed. Truthfully, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a worse job than Cawthon did with this abominable script, one of the single worst to make it into a mainstream movie in recent memory (though Presence gives it a run for its money). At nearly two hours, it’s insufferably bloated while somehow remaining completely shallow in the process – the games are renowned for their at-time convoluted lore and backstory, so it’s not like there wasn’t the material to fill out a movie of this length, but Cawthon seems entirely opposed to getting in to any of the good stuff.
Why have Matthew Lillard meaningfully expand on his role as William Afton when we could have a B-plot about a middle school science fair? Why not pivot to a new antagonist whose motivation is…uh, damn all those parents to hell, I guess, because three of them hit her with the “not now, sweetheart” in her time of need? Why not scrap the central emotional plot between Mike and Abby in favour of Elizabeth Lail having a single dream sequence and then revealing a secret brother with the most comically evil eyebrows in the entire universe? Oh, how about great, clanking animatronics somehow silently creeping up on Mike in a sequence that cack-handedly tries to capture some of the video game’s interface, forgetting that what made that so fun was the fact that we were, you know, actually playing it?
Every choice here that’s made feels like the wrong one, dodging the interesting parts of the lore to focus on dull fanservice and nods to the games that only serve to slow things to a crawl. The dialogue is so hackneyed that, half the time, you can guess what’s going to come out of the character’s mouths before they say it; the scare sequences trudge along with an utter lack of tension that does no justice to the beautiful animatronics (which are just as striking as they were the first time around). The acting is universally godawful, but I can’t even really put much blame on the cast when the script is this inhuman; character development is evicted to make room for more slack-jawed fanservice that feels so crammed-in as to be downright insulting. It’s almost a how-not-to in telling a story, and I can hardly believe that it made it all the way through production without someone going “hey, but this…this really sucks, right?”.
It’s a shame, because there’s still some of the great stuff hanging around from the first movie here – I still like what Tammi did behind the camera, and the production design, particularly of the abandoned restaurants, is as perfect as it could be. But the script utterly obliterated the possibility of a decent sequel from the off – it’s not that there’s a good movie hidden beneath the problems, but rather that the very plot itself is such a boring mess that it could never have succeeded, even in the most polished hands.
I have no doubt that we’ll get a FNAF movie trilogy, but I can only hope that Scott Cawthon is kept at least a hundred yards away from the script at all times – even if the damage done to the plot and lore at this point is pretty much insurmountable. This sequel doesn’t feel like it’s for fans of the series, nor for newbies – instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of being crammed into a springtrap suit that leaves you begging for the Game Over screen.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 