<em>Fifty Shades Darker</em>: A Spoilereview
“I want you back. We can renegotiate terms.”
Ah, love.
The above line is delivered to Anastasia Steele by Christian Grey near the beginning of Fifty Shades Darker, the second movie adaptation of the trilogy of zillion-selling erotic novels by Erika Mitchell (pen name E. L. James). But one imagines similar words being spoken by executives of Universal Pictures to Mitchell herself following the completion of the first installment in the series, Fifty Shades of Grey.
That film was directed by the respected artist Sam (short for Samantha) Taylor-Johnson, and she and Mitchell reportedly fought over almost every aspect of the production, the latter having been granted uncommon creative control when she signed over the rights to her books. The result was a very bad movie, but one considerably less bad than the book it was based on.
This time out, Taylor-Johnson has been replaced with gun-for-hire James Foley, best known for directing Glengarry Glen Ross a very long time ago; meanwhile, the previous screenwriter, Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks), has been replaced by Niall Leonard, a television writer who also happens to be Mitchell’s husband. The result is that there is no one to mediate or improve Mitchell’s appallingly crass, childish, and retrograde exercise in wish fulfillment.
A movie this bad deserves to have its flaws enunciated clearly, so what follows is one in, , , and .) Those who would prefer to avoid spoilers should stop reading now; those who want a sense of the awfulness to come, or would rather spend a few minutes reading about that awfulness than two hours experiencing it firsthand, read on.
