As bad as the first movie is (and it’s quite terrible), it doesn’t try to pass Christian off as a good dude. Elena was teased as a major figure in Christian’s life in the first movie, but the sequel doesn’t really seem to know what to do with her beyond a couple terse conversations with Anastasia.īut where Fifty Shades Darker really falls apart is in trying to sell us on the notion that Christian Grey should be with anybody. Leila pops up and then disappears for long stretches of the film.
They feel like stuff that was in the novel, James demanded that they be included, and screenwriter Niall Leonard (who happens to be James’ husband) kind of tossed them in without any real idea on how to give them an impact. However, these new subplots rarely emerge or make much of a difference in Anastasia and Christian’s relationship. Their rekindled relationship is made more difficult by the presence of Leila ( Bella Heathcote), one of Christian’s former subs who is stalking Anastasia, and by Elena ( Kim Basinger), the older woman who turned Christian on to kinky sex. She reluctantly agrees, and although Christian remains as possessive and domineering as ever, she gently pushes back against his revolting personality. But Christian decides he can’t be without Anastasia, and resolves to give her the “vanilla” relationship she wants if they can be together again. Rather than creating a unique love story, Fifty Shades Darker seems like it hates just about everyone.Īt the end of Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia Steele ( Dakota Johnson) left Christian Grey ( Jamie Dornan) after his BDSM kink became too violent for her to handle. James’ novel tries to pass off a completely toxic relationship as something healthy and profound, and instead it just makes the audience either laugh or cringe. If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, you were wrong, because we now have Fifty Shades Darker, which exacerbates the problem by trying to forge a romantic relationship between two characters who have no business being together. Afterward, we lit cigarettes and murmured about what fun we had even though we also agreed that we could never go there again.Fifty Shades of Grey was a kinky sex movie that was neither kinky nor sexy, and featured an abysmal lack of chemistry between its two leads. Soon, though, the individual scattered titters and excited murmurings began to shift and to harmonize as skeptics and true believers alike became as one, joined by the display of so much awfulness.
There’s not much else to say except that the all-media screening of “Fifty Shades Darker” I attended had scarcely begun before it turned into a live edition of the TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” At least some of the few hundred moviegoers seem to have arrived with modest expectations others had seen “Fifty Shades of Grey,” so presumably knew better. The use of Ben and Jerry’s vanilla ice cream, however, made for great product placement. The sex is strained and certainly seems to burn serious calories (Christian flips Anastasia like a pancake), but finally pales next to the commodity fetishism. There are also abrupt swings in tone, dead-end detours and flatline performances, including from Ms.
He’s a professional with real credits, so I assume that he’s not finally responsible for the ineptitude of “Fifty Shades Darker,” which ranges from continuity issues to unsurprisingly risible writing. Taylor-Johnson are said to have clashed over the making of the first movie, it is easy to guess who the dominant player was in “Fifty Shades Darker,” and it probably wasn’t the new director, James Foley. With low-key charisma, she drew you toward her, so that your attention and hopes fell on her instead of the nonsense surrounding her. It also had a natural star in Dakota Johnson, one of those unforced charmers who can deliver bad lines so gracefully that, after a while, you don’t much care about their quality. For all its flaws, “Fifty Shades of Grey” had a competent director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, who mostly wrung a watchable movie out of the material, partly by letting lightness and laughter in.
Well, not quite, though it’s always instructive to watch how many different ways one movie can go wrong and to guess what happened between a first feature and a second. The result is a clutch of best sellers, a hit movie (based on the first book, “Fifty Shades of Grey”) and now a sequel, “Fifty Shades Darker,” that’s almost bad enough to recommend. But it apparently took a writer as terrible as E L James, the author of the “Fifty Shades” series, to really hit the commercial sweet spot.
The likes of Madonna and the photographer Helmut Newton had primed that pump long ago, turning dominance, submission and toys into an acceptable spectacle. The big tee-hee about the “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon is that it’s brought ostensibly scandalous heterosexual sex - with its whips and restraints - out of the shadows and into the mainstream.