Fifty Shades Darker (2017)

Fifty Shades Darker (2017)

 IMDB  Rating 4.9/10  

When a wounded Christian Grey tries to entice a cautious Ana Steele back into his life, she demands a new arrangement before she will give him another chance. As the two begin to build trust and find stability, shadowy figures from Christian’s past start to circle the couple, determined to destroy their hopes for a future together.

Director: James Foley

Writers: Niall Leonard (screenplay), E.L. James (based on the novel by)

Stars: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson

R | 1h 58min | Drama, Romance

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆  

 Submissive sequel offers little light relief but lots of washing

Film fans in search of titillation are unlikely to be sated by Loving’s snuggles or Moonlight’s angsty, unseen intimacy. In tilting for Oscars, contenders are emulating the statuettes’ anatomy.

But the only thing aroused by this headache of a movie is a desire to see Sam Taylor-Johnson back at the reins. Somehow, in 2015, she transformed James’s appalling porn into something watchable. She coached charming performances from Dakota Johnson as bookish graduate Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as deranged but dishy billionaire Christian Grey. She then departed the franchise, apparently in reaction to the author’s whip-cracking. In her place: the slavish duo of James Foley (House of Cards) as director and Niall Leonard (Mr EL James, coincidentally) in charge of the script.

Submission might turn on our hero – and, perhaps, his creator – but it does not make for a gripping film. The plotless pant of the novel is faithfully recreated, as Christian wins Anastasia back by renouncing bondage unless she’s really, really up for it, then various peripheral figures – a former submissive, old flame Kim Basinger, Anastasia’s hot rotter of a boss – try to force them apart.

Spliced between such drama come the sex scenes, steamy as a greasy spoon and almost as erotic. Fifty Shades’s chief way of proving how dirty it is seems to be making its stars take endless showers – which inevitably leads to more sex, and so a terrible cycle of shagging and washing.

A few leather cuffs do pop up, but they’re unbuckled fast so the missionary position can be better adopted. Nipple clamps put in an appearance, but only on fingers. The most outre it gets is our heroine going to a party wearing a couple of silver balls in a place that doesn’t really show them off (Anastasia: “You’re not putting those in my butt.” Christian: “They’re not for your butt”). Yet even these are just a warm-up act for some standard-issue humping, beneath, of all things, a poster for The Chronicles of Riddick.

Taylor-Johnson’s genius was to handle such batty trash with pace and class. This time round, there’s neither. The sex comes suddenly, like someone else’s drinks – all blow-out, no build-up. Christian is so accomplished he can bring Anastasia to the brink of orgasm fully clad in a crowded lift which isn’t going far and whose muzak is Van Morrison. “Deep down inside me,” explains Anastasia in the book after this sort of thing, “sweet joy unfurls like a morning glory in the early dawn.” On film, we just get a grin and a gasp.

A final word for a late scene featuring acrobatic shots of Christian in his penthouse gym, atop a pommel horse. It was this, rather than any of what our heroine calls “kinky-fuckery”, that got the premiere audience applauding. If James wants the horse she’s flogging to show signs of life, the best way forward might be a stab at chastity.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Director James Foley takes the reins for the second film adapting E.L. James' best-selling S&M romance series.  

"Darker"? James Foley's Fifty Shades Darker, the second big-screen outing adapting E.L. James's best-selling S&M fairy tale, goes rather in the other direction, replacing most of the first installment's talk of master/servant dynamics and contractually delineated sex play with more lovey-dovey hoohah than most self-respecting rom-coms are willing to deliver. Taking the series over from Sam Taylor-Johnson, whose Fifty Shades of Grey earned jeers alongside its $570 million worldwide haul in 2015, Foley has the job of introducing some external threats to the unlikely coupling of Dakota Johnson's Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan's Christian Grey. But he and screenwriter Niall Leonard can hardly milk enough novelty out of these new villains to win back fans who felt burned by the first film. A concluding installment is already en route; expect diminishing returns every Valentine's Day.

Leonard and Foley offer enough semi-naked sex scenes here to prove that quantity is no substitute for chemistry. Both leads are attractive and look good without clothes, but the roteness of their bulge-flexing intimacies is such that when, near the film's end, the movie showed off Mr. Dornan's physique in a gym scene, women at Wednesday's preview screening were openly laughing at the contrivance.

There was a lot of snickering at that screening, in fact, though some scenes inexplicably slid by without mockery. Where were the guffaws when Ana described cunnilingus as "kinky f––ery," as if it weren't an integral part of modern-day, plain-vanilla lovemaking? Where were the scornful hoots when Christian, in response to Ana's comment, "I didn't know you had a place in Aspen," quipped "I have a lot of places"? Especially in this Trumpian era, can we not at last openly mock such one-percenter smugness?

 But of course, the desire to be swept away by Prince Bucksalot is more central to the Fifty Shades brand than any curiosity about non-mainstream sexual gratification. Darker hardly hides this, and gets into trouble when it pretends not to care about Christian Grey's riches. How can the filmmakers keep a straight face when they have Anastasia complaining about Christian's desire to "own" her and then, barely two scenes later, show her agog at a closet full of designer gowns and lingerie? Blindfolds and tasteful wrist restraints are just this year's superficial twist on the Cinderella story. Fifty Shades may take pains not to let Anastasia actually accept anything as gauche as cash for the body she hands over so willingly to her prince, as Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman. But it's hard to pretend this represents any meaningful step toward a future feminists can be proud of.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

The big tee-hee about the “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon is that it’s brought ostensibly scandalous heterosexual sex — with its whips and restraints — out of the shadows and into the mainstream. The likes of Madonna and the photographer Helmut Newton had primed that pump long ago, turning dominance, submission and toys into an acceptable spectacle. But it apparently took a writer as terrible as E L James, the author of the “Fifty Shades” series, to really hit the commercial sweet spot. The result is a clutch of best sellers, a hit movie (based on the first book, “Fifty Shades of Grey”) and now a sequel, “Fifty Shades Darker,” that’s almost bad enough to recommend.

Well, not quite, though it’s always instructive to watch how many different ways one movie can go wrong and to guess what happened between a first feature and a second. For all its flaws, “Fifty Shades of Grey” had a competent director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, who mostly wrung a watchable movie out of the material, partly by letting lightness and laughter in. It also had a natural star in Dakota Johnson, one of those unforced charmers who can deliver bad lines so gracefully that, after a while, you don’t much care about their quality. With low-key charisma, she drew you toward her, so that your attention and hopes fell on her instead of the nonsense surrounding her. She was a stealth weapon.

Given how Ms. James and Ms. Taylor-Johnson are said to have clashed over the making of the first movie, it is easy to guess who the dominant player was in “Fifty Shades Darker,” and it probably wasn’t the new director, James Foley. He’s a professional with real credits, so I assume that he’s not finally responsible for the ineptitude of “Fifty Shades Darker,” which ranges from continuity issues to unsurprisingly risible writing. There are also abrupt swings in tone, dead-end detours and flatline performances, including from Ms. Johnson. The sex is strained and certainly seems to burn serious calories (Christian flips Anastasia like a pancake), but finally pales next to the commodity fetishism. The use of Ben and Jerry’s vanilla ice cream, however, made for great product placement.

There’s not much else to say except that the all-media screening of “Fifty Shades Darker” I attended had scarcely begun before it turned into a live edition of the TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” At least some of the few hundred moviegoers seem to have arrived with modest expectations; others had seen “Fifty Shades of Grey,” so presumably knew better. Soon, though, the individual scattered titters and excited murmurings began to shift and to harmonize as skeptics and true believers alike became as one, joined by the display of so much awfulness. Afterward, we lit cigarettes and murmured about what fun we had even though we also agreed that we could never go there again.

Read full review at New York times

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆    

An alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG

There’s nothing original in observing that the author of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy writes with all the delicacy and grace of a rhinoceros fleeing a bush fire – nor that with 125 million book sales behind her and counting, she’s clearly welcome to write however she darn well pleases.

But there’s something about the film adaptation of the second Fifty Shades novel that feels jarring in a new way for this series. It doesn’t strive to redeem its source material, as did Sam Taylor-Johnson’s unfairly reviled, sleekly fun adaptation of the first book – but it can’t quite bring itself to wallow in its boundless indecency and/or preposterousness either.

The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.

There’s a wine-tossing, face-slapping, cocktail party showdown here that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Dynasty, and a masked ball so heavy on chintz and cheese and coloured spotlights, you keep expecting Jim Carrey’s Riddler to burst through the window and announce that he’s poisoned the vol-au-vents.

And while the sex scenes are stylish enough – though they lack the marble-cold, sculptural feel of the first film’s – would I sound like a ravening pervert if I complained they didn’t go quite far enough, or that there weren’t enough of them?

Perhaps the root of the problem is that Fifty Shades Darker is one of those films that can be made without anyone ever having to ask the vital question ‘who is this for?’, because the answer – the fans – is clear from the start. But as answers go, it’s not detailed enough, and the film’s lack of focus – in terms of plot, character, tone, and virtually everything else – gnaws at your patience throughout.

Both are just as watchable as last time – and the terrific Johnson, who’s since appeared in Luca Guadagnino’s glorious (and actually sexy) romantic thriller A Bigger Splash, is one of those performers you can’t help but cheer for.

But in place of the defined contours of their relationship last time around – attraction and resentment pushing and pulling to a genuinely dramatic and memorable conclusion – is total emotional incoherence.

Read full review at The telegraph

Sequel Seeks a Sadist's Cuddlebunny Center  

In theory, Fifty Shades Darker is great no matter how bad it is. To call it a lousy movie is missing the point: It’s a functional movie, a girls-night-out commando mission whose job is to get in, get out, and get the job done in between.

The harsh reality is that most erotica geared toward women is ridiculous, of the soft-focus “eating-a-peach-while-blindfolded” variety. Fifty Shades Darker (directed by James Foley; the first was brought to us by Sam Taylor-Johnson), even with all its nods to BDSM, is no exception. That’s chiefly because it, like so much of literature “geared” toward women—whatever that really means—is so eager to have it both ways, or, rather, all ways: Christian has a serious problem! (In one of the movie’s many howler moments, he informs Anastasia, in a line that could have been lifted from a ’50s sex-ed training film, “I’m not a dominant. The right term is sadist.”) But it’s not his fault! You know, his childhood! He can be changed! But the sex is so hot! And he’s the man I really want to spend my whole life with! Honey, please pass the toast! And so forth.

It’s all fantasy, so what’s the harm? There isn’t any. And if millions of girls or guys go out to see Fifty Shades Darker with their friends for a giggle or two, then the world is a happier place. It’s also tempting to make the case for both Fifty Shades movies as positive forces that might move women toward better understanding and acceptance of their own sexuality. If it works out that way for anyone, great. But who wants to read the killjoy who’s going to turn Fifty Shades into a PSA? Surely not I.But there’s one significant problem with both Fifty Shades movies that’s impossible to ignore. Dornan is just a dud. The problem may have more to do with the conception of the character than anything else: How do you play a self-described sadist who’s really just a misunderstood cuddlebunny underneath? Not even Olivier could do it. (Or maybe he did, if you count Heathcliff.) But Dornan, with his brooding frat-boy demeanor, seems to sap energy away from Johnson, an appealing performer who has some of her mother’s saucy dazzle. (She's the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and Tippi Hedren's granddaughter.) Johnson is also fearless about doing nude scenes—there’s nothing prissy about her, and if there’s any sizzle to be found in Fifty Shades Darker, it’s happening around her. Please pass the handcuffs.

Read full review at Time