Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025)

The sequel to a video game adaptation that was itself not good, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 arrives with $240 million in the till and a 17 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a ratio that tells you everything about who this is for. Scott Cawthon wrote the script himself. Emma Tammi directs. The animatronics come from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and they are the only performers in the picture that anyone has described with affection. Critics called it incoherent, cheesy, thrill-free. None of them called it preachy. That distinction matters for our purposes.

There are faint stirrings of social consciousness. The supporting cast includes David Andrew Calvillo, Teo Briones, and Audrey Lynn-Marie, so the ensemble is not monochrome, though nobody in the marketing department thought to make a statement of it. A woman sits in the director's chair, and Charlotte Emily, Vanessa Shelly, and young Abby all act on their own motives instead of waiting to be rescued. Charlotte's revenge is a horror mechanic, not a gender critique. Agency here is a plot requirement. Nothing more.

Everything else is silent. No queer characters, no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no assault on corporate greed despite an entire franchise built on pizza and profit, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergence, no reworking of history. The film is a haunted attraction with a merchandise tie-in at Popeyes. It lectures no one. Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press complained of an after-school special vibe, which is the closest anyone came to finding a moral, and he meant it as an insult to the craft, not the politics. We are left with a product, competently manufactured, entirely uninterested in improving us.