Big day today, friends. Very big day.
After two long, agonizing years of waiting — though really, if you think about it, it’s been a lifetime — Fifty Shades Darker has finally made its way to movie theaters across this great land.
It feels good, doesn’t it? Like your soul is just a little more complete than it was yesterday.
There’s only one problem: according to reviews, it’s actually a pretty terrible movie.
It’s hard to swallow (that’s what she said), but the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey is apparently boring, dumb, and just so many other bad things.
To really get a feel for it, let’s dive into some of the worst reviews, all right?
As a review from Us Weekly puts it, “The pain is real.”
Sounds promising already, right?
“There are moments in Fifty Shades Darker when you might care more about Anastasia Steele’s lipstick shade than her tortured romance with cold billionaire Christian Grey.”
It’s not all bad though — on the bright side, this one “is more unintentionally hilarious than the original. In fact, some of the wooden line readings and melodramatic twists rank right up there with the gold standard of cinematic erotic camp.”
Yes. We’re getting comparisons to Showgirls here. This is real life.
A critic from Newsday says that Fifty Shades Darker is “the year’s first true cinematic travesty,” and that it “manages the neat trick of being more explicit yet less erotic and far goofier than 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Alas, “it might have been a hoot if its sexual politics and baseline morality weren’t so objectionable.”
How’s that for some real talk? And it is real talk — Christian is not so much into being dominant as he is into being a controlling, abusive creep.
Playlist says the movie is “as sexy and stimulating as laundry detergent,” and that it “somehow becomes even less enticing and rousing” than the original movie.
“Actively dull and astoundingly flaccid,” the review continues, “the monotonously dreary, everlasting humdrum BDSM fan fiction franchise can never decide if it’d rather be smutty or classy.”
“Never has unconventional sex seemed so f-cking boring.”
Amazing, right? And that one also serves as a delightful reminder that Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction.
What a world, what a world.
But in less you’re thinking that the issues with this movie is with the story itself, or that the movie was just poorly made, please make no mistake: the actors were also awful.
As the Newark Star-Ledger puts it, “Dakota Johnson tries hard — or, at least harder than Jamie Dornan, who mostly acts with his stubble … For a movie about bondage, the stars seem strangely disconnected.”
USA Today sums everything up pretty well with this:
“There are a lot of negative things to be said about Fifty Shades Darker. But it does impress in one sense: The erotica lite sequel somehow manages to be worse than the stupefyingly bad Fifty Shades of Grey.”
See y’all at the movies!!!
