Spoiler alert!
Here’s a synopsis: A hot, incredibly wealthy man who is never at work, a quiet and beautiful, book-loving woman, good fashion, a steamy shower scene, a morning work-out scene that provides a much-needed close-up of Jamie Dornan’s godlike body, a masquerade, fireworks, a ring, a “yes” and lots of sex, along with sex toys that my friends and I had no idea even existed before we saw this movie.
I certainly had a good time watching Fifty Shades Darker. Jamie Dornan/Christian Grey was fun to watch and I went to see it with three girlfriends on a Saturday afternoon. It required absolutely no thinking. It had catchy songs. I was sucked in. There was a general storyline: a love story clouded by jealousy and dark pasts. People always want to see cute love stories where characters have to fight their way through obstacle after obstacle to get to their loved one; but, people also love to see their deepest, darkest desires appearing on the big screen.
Sadly, the characters never experienced any real struggles. From the very beginning of the movie, Ana, the protagonist, appearing to enjoy her new, independent single life away from her ex-boyfriend, goes back to Christian after he pays for photographs taken by her secret admirer and asks her out to one dinner. Things get a little tense after Ana is followed by Christian’s two ex-girlfriends and then harassed by her evil boss, but they are defeated so easily that I had to question if the villains had any functions in this movie. Even when Christian gets into a plane accident (!!!), nothing happens to him. He comes back to his apartment completely unscathed.
Every time a self-created, unnecessary conflict is settled, Ana and Christian have sex. I never had anything against the sex scenes in this movie, but I found very little pleasure watching them in Fifty Shades Darker. Sex, for the most part of the movie, is a celebration of their victory over something that seemed scary at the beginning, but, in reality, brings no danger to either Ana or Christian. All the villains fail and all the misunderstandings are cleared out in a heartbeat. All things lead to sex and happily-ever-after. There were just no surprises in Fifty Shades Darker.
The irony was that surprises were what made a name for the book/movie series. The Fifty Shades series came to the public’s eye as a play on the Twilight series with a sexual twist. No one saw that coming, and everyone loved it. Twilight was PG and undeniably juvenile; Fifty Shades was R-rated and unpredictably adult. Readers were so crazy about the series because everything in the books were guilty pleasures.
Fifty Shades of Grey, however, left zero room for anticipation and imagination, two key elements that constitute a good surprise. Every plot twist was so reasonably planted that none of them seemed like a plot twist. Everything that the characters did was so obnoxiously casual that the audience did not even have the motivation to raise basic questions about the plot, such as “why would Ana never really stand up for her strong belief in independence when Christian literally just slipped $24,000 into her bank account?” But really, though?
This leads me to an issue with the movie: It just did not make any sense. According to the logic of the movie, Ana’s deep, undying love for Christian was what made her agree to Christian’s dinner date the first time they saw each other since they broke up (which had been two years for the audience because Fifty Shades of Grey came out in 2015). The same love also led her to reject her own suggestion to “take things slow” this time around, as well as to get past her previous fear. Okay, I could understand that.
Why, then, even bother bringing up so much about dark pasts? The movie opens with Christian’s deeply concealed childhood horrors of being abused by his own father, yet it was never mentioned once later. With tears in both their eyes he shared with Ana the heartbreaking death of his mother, yet the couple swiftly move on to more sex after Christian’s supposedly painful revealing of his deepest secret. While Ana was troubled, or even disgusted, after seeing how wholeheartedly obedient Christian’s former submissive was to him, she quickly moves on from the topic after Christian promising that the past was past and letting her draw some “boundaries” on his cigarette-burnt chest. All of these weird struggles just made felt anti-climactic and boring.
Honestly, the best parts of the movie were the trailers, which were pretty exciting to watch because the audience had no idea what the movie would be about. However, the movie itself, with no plot twists, lame villains and an extremely predictable plot, had zero thrills. Even the sex scenes in the movie were a little boring. Everyone knew where and when these scenes were going to take place – and they happened.
Would I watch the next Fifty Shades movie? Probably.
Would I pay to see it? Heck no.