Film
Tedious. Badly acted. Unsexy. So no doubt this sequel will go on to be a spanking success
Fifty Shades Darker C ert: 18 1hr 58mins
Christian Grey is adamant: he’s a changed man. ‘No rules, no punishments...’ he begins. ‘And no secrets?’ adds a hopeful Ana Steele, the girl who just can’t say no to Seattle’s favourite billionaire with his infamous fondness for sado-masochistic sex. He nods in agreement.
Yup, whisper it quietly, but Grey (Jamie Dornan) really is in the market, it appears, for what, last time out, he dismissed as a ‘vanilla relationship’. A likely story, you might think, and you’d be right. An appointment in the famous red room does, of course, await, but my goodness it’s a tedious long old haul getting there. This is not so much Fifty
Shades Darker as Fifty Shades Duller, and on so many fronts too.
The acting is bland, the narrative drive – rather like the spanking – weak, and the two elements supposed to inject a bit of tension into proceedings – Ana’s predatory new boss and a scary-looking girl who turns out to be one of Christian’s exes – disappear for large chunks of the story. And that’s before the ridiculous incident in which our dashing hero goes worryingly missing for what – 90 seconds? We should be chewing our fingers to the bone; I’d barely got them to my mouth – and only then to stifle a yawn.
Was this ever going to end? Is there really going to be another one of these out next year, finally bringing EL James’s interminable trilogy to a close? Given that the 2015 original somehow took close to $600million at the global box office, I fear the answer to the latter is yes.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, who directed the original, may have departed in search of more creative pastures but as James Foley, a film-maker perhaps best known for Glengarry Glen Ross 25 years ago, takes over, the formula remains the same. Fifty
Shades talks a good raunchy deal – with its kegel balls, nipple clamps and asterisk-challenging talk of kinky f***ery – but it’s never explicit or exploitative, particularly of its young female lead, Dakota Johnson. She may be a young-looking 27 but she seems to have the street-smarts to have negotiated the contract rider that if her nether regions can’t be in shadow or otherwise obscured by some muscular part of her male co-star, then the pants are staying on. As an actress, however, she doesn’t seem to be learning from experience – as Ana, she’s duller and blander than she was last time round and it’s difficult to warm overly to a
character who resembles a doormat.
The more experienced and this time around more be-stubbled Dornan – the Co. Down star of TV’s The Fall – is possibly a little better but here the problem is that the character he’s playing is even more of a control-freak creep than he was last time. If he’s not buying all the arthouse photos of her (‘I don’t want strangers gawping at you’) he’s shovelling thousands of dollars into her bank account and negotiating to buy the publishing company she’s just joined.
And what does Ana do when that last intervention works to her advantage? Oh, she cheerfully goes along with it, advancing her own career at one particular meeting by suggesting that the company publish more unknown authors whose work appeared initially online. Given that’s how the world first heard of EL James, that’s the nearest we get to a joke in a seemingly endless two hours.
None of the supporting performances catches the eye, with the possible exception of Kim Basinger, who appears as Christian’s former, older, lover and seems all set for a bigger role in part three.
Just like the first film, the best thing about Fifty Shades Darker is the soundtrack, which has songs by Taylor Swift, Halsey and John Legend among others. So if you don’t come out making plans to buy a spreader bar (Don’t know? Then don’t ask) at least you’ll come out humming a few decent tunes.