My daughter is a big fan of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games, and all their supplemental material, including the movies. Her mother took her and some friends to see the first movie on opening night in the theater. She loved it, and when it came to streaming, she made me watch it with her. I remember absolutely nothing about the movie. I gave it three stars on Letterboxd but I suspect at least half a star was due to her excitement over watching it again. Exuberance is catching.

She has been super excited over the sequel for weeks now, and she talked me into buying her and three friends tickets to it for opening night tonight. They are old enough to go to the theater alone now, so the wife and I were looking forward to a quiet night at home.

Unfortunately, one of the friends got sick, and not being ones to let good money go to waste, the wife and I drew straws to see who would take the now empty seat. I drew the short straw. You would think that if my daughter’s excitement encouraged me to enjoy the last movie while watching it by ourselves at home, then a packed theater full of excited fans would make this viewing even more enjoyable. You would be wrong. The reasons for this are twofold: 

1. It has been a long week, and I was tired. I was in no mood to go to the theater and watch a movie I wasn’t really interested in.
2. Those excited fans were all teenagers.

The two boys sitting next to me (I’d put their age at 15) talked through the entire movie. I hate when people talk during movies.But then I realized my daughter’s friends were also talking through parts of the film and excitedly pointing at the screen when someone happened that they recognized from the games. I listened to the boys talk, and they two were just excited to be there, and were having a good time, So why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?

The movie isn’t good. I’ve never played the game, but I can see the appeal of wandering around an old, dark, abandoned amusement palace where animatronic robots jump out and try to kill you. But that doesn’t translate very well to the movies. Especially when the movie attempts to build things like character and story into the murdering robot movie.

Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) seems to have recovered from the events of the first movie (which happened a year ago) and more or less has his stuff together. His daughter Abby (Piper Rubio) misses the friends she made back then (and remember, her friends were actually the ghosts of five murdered children inhabiting those animatronic robots). Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) also returns from the first movie, but she’s still haunted by the past. 

The story of what happened on those five nights one year ago has become something of a legend in town. People love the stories and, in fact, are planning an anniversary party of sorts where they will all dress up as the robots and have a carnival.

There is also a science fair about to happen, and Abby is working on a robot submission (when that fails, guess what robot will come to her aid?). Apparently the school of this small town is cool enough to have an entire robotics department. It is led by a vicious and mean teacher (played to perfection by Wayne Knight) who will surely get his comeuppance.

Matthew Lillard returns in flashbacks and Skeet Ulrich shows up at one point making it a mini-Scream reunion.

Yada, yada, yada, there is some lore building (and no doubt plenty of references to the games I haven’t played). Abby is getting a spirit called from some other dead girl who needs her to come to the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza to help the animatronic robots flee the restaurant and wreak havoc on the town.

There are a few decent jump scares, and the scenes in the pizzeria have a certain eeriness to them, but mostly the film is just dumb. I suspect a lot of that is the translation from game to screen. Things that work well when you are playing a game are pretty idiotic when watching it happen in a movie.

For example, the original Freddy’s has some kind of fake river flowing through it. It is maybe three  feet deep, and the walls surrounding it go up another foot or two. It would not be a difficult thing to climb out of. Twice characters fall into it and can’t get out of it. Another time a character has to log into a computer and try and shut down the Wi-Fi signal (which is what controls the robots). We see a lot of screenshots with him clicking through boxes. Both of these things seem very much like something you’d deal with effectively in a game, but on screen…boring.

But the girls had fun, and sometimes that’s all that matters.