For a franchise whose original book series has a reputation for exciting women with its spontaneous acts of BDSM (bondage, domination, submission and masochism), the film sequel “Fifty Shades Darker” oddly features Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, “How to Be Single”) undressed more often than Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan, “The Fall”). This is just one of the many confusing things about this film, which is desperately trying to repeat the same feat as its successful (and critically hated) counterpart “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
The film, directed by James Foley (“Glengarry Glen Ross”), begins by following Anastasia as we see her living independently from Christian after breaking up with him. This time alone does not last long, as Christian stalks his way to finding her, where he then asks for a renegotiation in order to get her back. No rules, no punishments is his offer. Anastasia, without putting up a fight, easily agrees to these terms. For the remainder of the film’s running time, both Anastasia and Christian learn to adapt to their new relationship. Christian tries to learn how to not have a women be his “submissive,” and Anastasia tries to understand why Christian enjoys being so dominant.
This second installment—at the bare minimum—is supposed to keep the provocative qualities that originally made the first film successful whilst continuing its story. More or less, “Fifty Shades Darker” is just two hours of the pair dating with some awkward pauses for the mandatory sex scenes.
The dialogue and pacing is brutal and the characters do not make it any less bearable. Christian is intended to come across as the desirable broken man who comes from rags to riches. In reality, he’s just a creepy jerk. His attempts to be in a normal relationship with Anastasia still involve him controlling her in ways that are uncalled for. What’s more frustrating is that Anastasia still sticks around and obeys him. This film tries to make her look like a blossoming wallflower, but she is not nearly as autonomous as the film and Christian think her to be.
If Christian’s hostile behaviour is supposed to be charming, then there is absolutely no actual romance between the two. The lack of cute moments only made the sex scenes a part of the problem with the film’s pacing. Once a pop song begins to play, the audience can quickly understand what is going to happen…benign Rated-R sex. Although the sex scenes were bland and unnecessary, there was a time where an effort was made to switch things up—during one sexual encounter, jazz music was playing.
The makers of the film make it clear that they do not care about its audience. Author of the series E.L. James had disagreements with “Fifty Shades of Grey” screenplay adapter Kelly Marcel for not seeing eye-to-eye in deciding how to be faithful to the novel. James’s husband Niall Leonard wrote this film instead, and the dialogue suffers miserably from this. Also, this is not the thriller the trailers mislead one to believe. That, along with other minor moments, are only subplots that are placed in the film to make it vaguely appear that there is stuff actually happening.
Unfortunately, “Fifty Shades Darker” commits the same sin that so many films in a franchise commit: it is more concerned with setting up the next film than focusing on the current project. There are some characters introduced in this movie that have no pay off and I can only assume they are sadly going to return for “Fifty Shades Freed.”
Moral of the story: do not watch this film. Based on the mid-credit scene at the end of the film, this “Fifty Shades” train will just need to go through its course and we’ll just need to look forward to watching it go off the rails when it crashes and burns.
