Fifty Shades Darker

“Take off your panties. Right. Now.” That’s right – the kids are back togeth­er. After hard-cuck­ing him at the breath­tak­ing finale of 2015’s sur­pris­ing­ly rad­i­cal Fifty Shades of Grey, Anas­ta­sia Steele (Dako­ta John­son) returns look­ing for some­thing a lit­tle more ​“vanil­la” from her spank-hap­py bil­lion­aire admir­er, Chris­t­ian Grey (Jamie Dornan).

But it’s not long before she’s tip-toe­ing coquet­tish­ly around his lux­u­ri­ant pent­house­/­man-cave, and peek­ing through the key­hole of the master’s own pri­vate sex­u­al for­bid­den zone: the Red Room. Grey him­self is, again, a com­i­cal­ly over-jacked com­pos­ite of the Milk Tray Man, Ron Jere­my and some kind of awful, bray­ing nar­cis­sist who likes noth­ing more than to work a pum­mel-horse in front of a giant bay win­dow. The big reveal in this film (and per­haps the only sign that Grey might have a tac­it genet­ic con­nec­tion to the human race) is that he has a Chron­i­cles of Rid­dick poster on the wall of his child­hood bed­room. This is the sort of high-cal­i­bre char­ac­ter short­hand you sim­ply don’t get at film school.

But aside from the Rid­dick poster, this is gru­elling, dull and not of this Earth. Any sequel worth its salt, par­tic­u­lar­ly one that fol­lows up a suc­cess­ful orig­i­nal, iden­ti­fies the qual­i­ty mate­r­i­al from the orig­i­nal and then goes for broke in amp­ing it up. Fifty Shades Dark­er is all but uniden­ti­fi­able from the open­ing instal­ment, save the fact that it feels infe­ri­or in almost every way that mat­ters. It takes trashy day­time soap at face val­ue, and fix­ates on the type of pet­ty rela­tion­ship pow­er plays which would make the casu­al observ­er want to reach for the near­est Katana blade and wood­en spoon. It’s like watch­ing two under-dressed, over-paid air­heads send ​‘I wuv wu’ mes­sages over What­sApp and then smile in smug self sat­is­fac­tion. Then they meet and show­er together.

Wor­thy of men­tion is the appalling music selec­tions that are cranked up over the han­ky-panky sequences. It’s hard to imag­ine that a group of cre­ative, well-paid peo­ple sat in a dark­ened room, exam­ined the footage and thought, yes, that’s the music we need play­ing over this scene. Anoth­er over-pro­duced slow jam writ­ten for the school run. It’s like those old UHF tube tele­vi­sions where, occa­sion­al­ly, the sound from anoth­er sta­tion inter­feres with the pro­gramme you’re watch­ing. And there’s also a bit where Ana, once more Mr Grey’s lover, decides to come over, and on the sound­track we hear Jeff Buckley’s ​‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’. The high­light of the film, how­ev­er, is undoubt­ed­ly the moment where Grey takes a heli­copter to a busi­ness meet­ing in Port­land and it looks like he’s bound for Juras­sic Park.

The prob­lem here is that the film too often feels like it’s mak­ing des­per­ate and forth­right attempts to con­nect to a demo­graph­ic, a strat­e­gy it clear­ly prizes over tying to lift some­thing dra­mat­i­cal­ly work­able from the garbage-fire that is EL James’ source mate­r­i­al. So preva­lent is the cin­e­mat­ic motif of a film char­ac­ter walk­ing by a promi­nent­ly placed brand name, or deliv­er­ing a heart­felt mono­logue with a gar­ish cor­po­rate logo drag­ging eyes away from the mat­ter at hand, that it no longer seems wor­thy of crit­i­cal deliberation.

Yet direc­tor James Foley is des­per­ate to con­tex­tu­alise this wannabe sor­did tale into the real, cap­i­tal­ist world. ​‘This could be you,’ is what the film wor­ry­ing­ly assures, over and over. And to help you along the path to sub­ur­ban sex­u­al ecsta­sy, why not take a glance at some of these fine prod­ucts and ser­vices… These chrome love balls are for sale. Prod­uct place­ment is a fact of life, but stack­ing it up here serves to sub­due any myth­ic qual­i­ty this pur­port­ed­ly swirling, star-crossed love affair might have pre­sent­ed. And trans­form­ing the banal into the myth­ic is exact­ly what cin­e­ma is. So you do the math.