Fifty Shades Darker (2017)

Yes, This movie is bad, but it’s also laughable. In many ways, Fifty Shades Darker is worse than the first film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), particularly the writing. Though the chemistry between Johnson and Dornan has improved, the movie has also completely removed all the dramatic stakes that the first film had. In the first movie which i watched online, the couples wanted to be together despite their incompatibility and ultimately separated because of their differences. In Fifty Shades Darker, their differences are resolved very early in the movie, so there’s no need to root for them for the rest of the film.  

Though it’s great to see a couple in a healthy relationship, it also makes for a really uninteresting movie which i decided to free download, especially when you don’t care about any of the characters. Anastasia’s little personality that she had in the first film is now stripped away as she conforms herself to Christian Grey, who (despite giving up his BDSM lifestyle to be with Anastasia) is still the same manipulative control freak that he was in the first film. Anastasia doesn’t know what she wants in this movie. First, she tells him she wants to take it slow after they got back together, and then they have sex in the same scene. She’s also very nostalgic about the red room. There’s a scene that bothered me where Christian Grey transfers $24,000 into Anastasia’s bank account after they had sex (the same sex scene described in the last paragraph). In the next scene, they’re at a coffee shop and Christian invites Anastasia to a ball, but she tells him she doesn’t have the dress for it. Bitch, he just gave you $24,000!  

Don’t tell him you don’t have a dress for the ball when he gave you $24,000. Every men in Fifty Shades Darker are all creepy. For some reason, Jose is back (the guy who forced himself onto Anastasia in the previous film) and Anastasia is still friends with him. My favorite character in the move is Anastasia’s sexually harassing boss named Jack (played by Eric Johnson), who gets instantly jealous when he sees Anastasia with Christian Grey, and also tried to force himself onto her. His character was ridiculously over-the-top and hilarious.  

I think Fifty Shades Darker is the only film where I found sexual harassment funny. I hope Eric Johnson gets more screen time in Freed as he’s the only reason why I have an iota of interest in the next film. Sexual harassment is obviously no laughing matter, but it’s impossible to take Fifty Shades Darker seriously as there are many pointless subplots in the film. There are flashbacks of Grey being abused as a child, a subplot involving his ex-girlfriend who’s jealous of Anastasia, and a helicopter crash where Grey miraculously survives. Fifty Shades Darker was also written by E. L. James’s husband, Niall Leonard. Kelly Marcel and Sam Taylor-Johnson (writer and director of the first film) at least tried to subvert the ridiculousness of the source material. There was no doubt that creative differences led to the change in the creative team, and I knew this change would make the movie worse. Niall Leonard and director James Foley will, unfortunately, return for the third and final film. Though Fifty Shades Darker is worse than the first film, I enjoyed it more because of it. It’s the best comedy of 2017 next to The Bye Bye Man. Even if you didn’t like the first film, I would still recommend Fifty Shades Darker to those who enjoy terrible full movies in HD.