Video review: "Fifty Shades Darker"

Occasionally people ask me why I don’t write more terrible reviews of movies.

(I’m assuming they’re being kind and asking why I don’t call more movies terrible, rather than describing the quality of the reviews I pen.)

The truth is that I genuinely feel Hollywood doesn’t make too many truly awful films. And I like to think of myself as a generous critic with wide-ranging tastes. I can usually find at least one or two things to like about even flicks I hate.

Everything is pretested and post-tested to death with audiences these days, so if the studios know they have a real honker on their hands, they’ll shelve it or push it straight to video. For tiny budget stinkers, they’ll simply refuse to show it to critics. So those tend to come and go pretty quickly at theaters without anyone seeing them, or me writing about them.

“Fifty Shades Darker” falls into the rare category of a high-profile movie that’s truly rotten. It’s a sequel to a big hit about a young woman who falls in for a man who’s into BDSM – cuffs, whips and such – and was based on a very popular trashy trio of novels read almost exclusively by women.

What it says about modern feminism that so many females are attracted to stories about dominant men who like to bruise the flesh of his lovers, I know not.

I actually didn’t think the first movie was half bad, but the follow-up is utterly groan-worthy. It’s not even the sort of bad that you can laugh at and mock; you just want it the pain to cease.

Dakota Johnson returns Anastasia Steele, and Jamie Dornan is back as Christian Grey, in a pair of characters battling for the title of Most Fake-Sounding Fictional Name. He’s a billionaire who likes to beat on ladies, and she’s a wallflower slowly discovering her taste for the kinky stuff.

The plot – screenplay by Niall Leonard, based on the book by E.L. James – concocts several nonsensical twists to fill up time in between the bedroom romps, which are much tamer than you’d think. These include Christian momentarily thought to be lost in a helicopter crash, and an old flame of his (Kim Basinger) showing up to turn the screws on his relationship with Ana.

“Darker,” like its predecessor, made a boatload of money, though a significantly smaller boat. I’d like to think it’s because audiences are wising up. But there’s still one more book in the “Fifty Shades” saga to adapt, so I don’t think the torture is going to stop anytime soon.

Watching this movie is like being a reluctant participant in a frisky whipping, and you’ve forgotten the safe word.

The film is being released on video with an Unrated version that promises to amp up the naughty stuff. Bonus features include deleted scenes and several making-of featurettes: “Writing Darker,” “A Darker Direction,” “Dark Reunion,” “New Threats,” “The Masquerade” and “Intimate with Darker.”

Sounds dark, huh?

Movie:



Extras: 

Review: "Fifty Shades Darker"

 So I read where Dakota Johnson said she used whiskey to get through shooting the sex scenes in “Fifty Shades Darker.” After watching the movie all I can say is: Where’s ours?

And I’m thinking a nice loooong pour, too -- four fingers, at least.

Wow, this is really garbage filmmaking. I scoffed at the first one, "Fifty Shades of Grey," based on the best-selling novel, but had to admit it wasn't terrible. The sequel is truly, desperately rotten.

It's a tiresome exercise in kink that's really not that kinky, a wannabe flesh-fest where there really isn't all that much skin on display. The weirdest things get between billionaire/S&M fan Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and reluctant submissive/lady love Anastasia Steele (Johnson) is when he shackles her ankles with a rod in between so she can't close her legs.

Oooooo, filthy!

I admit I don't know a lot about BDSM culture -- I've got enough pain in my life without bringing it into the bedroom -- but I get the sense true aficionados would find the couple's activities absurdly tame. Especially after Ana ditched Christian at the end of the first movie because he seemed to be enjoying her suffering.

(Wait, isn't that what the S&M part of BDSM is all about?)

He woos her back about five minutes into the sequel, promising to suppress his naughty ways and love Ana for the person she is. Specifically, a mousy, passive, self-doubting wallflower who pretends not to know how gorgeous she is.

The plot is a tawdry succession of cheap perils cooked up to keep us distracted from a story of two people who make sex a lot more complicated that it needs to be. This includes one of Christian's former "subs" -- women he essentially hired to be his submissive lovers -- going all cray-cray on him. She starts to follow Ana around with increasingly threatening behavior.

And then there's Kim Basinger as Elena, the older "dominant" woman who first turned Christian on to the leather-and-kneeling game when he was a teen. She shows up about once every half hour, her splotchy face seemingly held together by Bondo, to try to undermine Ana's relationship with him.

Then there's the helicopter subplot. It's like the filmmakers turned to each other and said, "Well, we can't just have them having sex the entire movie, but the story comes to a dead stop about 90 minutes in. What can we do to pump things up? ...I know!"

At some point the legions of female fans of these books and movies are going to have to own up to the fact that Christian Grey is, by any objective standard, a major league asshole. He likes to hurt women and is incredibly controlling of Ana, right down to ordering her meal for her at restaurants and telling her what clothes to wear to parties. (Along with... other accoutrements.)

But he's dreamy and a billionaire and has that protruding-veins look that's popular right now, so millions of women are willing to give Christian a pass as a fantasy object.

Let's do a quick experiment: Take all of Christian's personality quirks and bedroom predilections, and transpose that onto the personage of Donald Trump. How's that workin' for ya, ladies?

I've long enjoyed bragging that I never walked out of a movie. I came awfully close this time.

Really, the only thing I liked about the movie is a bit where Johnson repeats a line her mom, Melanie Griffith, said at the end of "Working Girl" when her new secretary offers to fetch her coffee. It's something very few people will get, but it made me think of a much better movie.

I started humming the theme song from that film, "Let the River Run," and it momentarily drowned out the pain of sitting through this one. After all, there was no booze handy.

Review: "Fifty Shades of Grey"

Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Which isn't to say it was any good, just not laugh-out-loud ridiculously dreadful.

Every few years Hollywood likes to get naughty. They'll make a big-profile movie with an overtly sexual angle and then milk it for all it's worth. "See? We're not afraid to push the envelope!"

Of course, most of these flicks end up being pretty tame. The best test is to wait a few years and see how it registers. Most likely people who bypassed the hullabaloo at the time will discover it's shown up on Netflix or what have you, watch it and think to themselves, "This is what all the fuss was about?"

Heck, remember when people got all boiled over about "Striptease"?

"Fifty Shades of Grey," based on the uber-popular book, is about a romance between an innocent young college girl and a billionaire with a taste for BDSM play. That stands for bondage, dominance and sadism-masochism -- I had to look it up -- which most people would just shorthand as bondage or S&M.

The book by E.L. James started out as fan fiction and is unread by me, but those who have tell me the writing is atrocious, including misspellings and bad grammar you rarely see in the mass publishing industry. Nonetheless, it's struck a chord with an overwhelmingly female audience, with it and its two sequels selling something like 100 million copies worldwide.

The story and dialogue are pretty goofy. It's the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-woos-girl, boy-wants-to-whip-girl-but-she's-not-so-sure-about-it kind of tale. They spend much of the movie discussing an actual contract to govern their sexual relationship, but somehow never get around to signing the thing and just go for it anyway.

(Attorneys will thus consider it a horror film.)

Everyone will want to know about the sex scenes, so let's go ahead and discuss that.

There are three -- well, four, with the last coming right on the heels of the third, so they kinda blend -- and there's a fair amount of flesh to be seen. We see a lot of her boobs and butt, and a whole bunch of sidal nudity where we imagine we might have gotten an oblique glimpse of the great-and-holy, but not really. He's also naked a lot, though not nearly as often, and somehow we don't really see very much of him -- certainly not a pickle shot, even a fabled and fleeting glimpse like Ben Affleck's peen in "Gone Girl."

Not surprisingly, the actors displaying all their wares are ones you've probably never heard of. Dakota Johnson plays Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan plays Christian Grey, and if those aren't the two most fake-sounding character names ever committed to paper, then I don't know what is.

You see, big stars don't like to show their bodies too much. Maybe they think it'll limit their careers, or they don't want to worry about it getting screencapped all over the web, or they just want to maintain a little bit of mystery around their persona.

You'll notice that even the rare ones that do prodigious nude scenes, like Ewan McGregor and Kate Winslet, tend to get kidded about it and then suddenly the kits stop coming off. Angelina Jolie used to drop trou all the time, and now we've had barely a hiney shot from her in the last decade. Maria Bello was Old Faithful for full frontal, and now she's making inspiring Disney flicks.

A young actor might do a daring nude scene to get noticed and launch their career, which is what I'm guessing Johnson and Dornan -- or at least their handlers -- are hoping for. Then they might have a cheeky scene (literally) or two as they're segueing into mainstream movies. But once they become a big box office draw or get nominated for an Oscar, the no-nudity clauses come out of the woodwork.

Maybe, if their star dims with time, they might do a nude scene for the sheer shock of it, but by then audiences are more interested in somebody else's niblets. This is known as the Meg Ryan effect. Finally, when they get old there's a possibility of a flash for sheer comic effect, like when Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas mooned us or Jack Nicholson walked in on Diane Keaton

Anyway, I guess I should talk about "Fifty Shades of Grey" some more, but I don't really feel like it. It's mildly sexy, at least the first time Christian blindfolds Anastasia with one of his ties and reaches for a leather riding crop. But mostly it's a bunch of talking about sex rather than doing it, false emotions and shitty dialogue.

I have no doubt this will big a big hit, because if even 20% of the people who read the book go see the movie, that's a lot of tickets. And clearly director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel are setting us up for a sequel. Maybe we deserve it.