![]() ![]() It’s not long before he’s authoritatively popping vaginal beads inside her person, whisking her off to masked balls (not his own) and forbidding her to go on work trips with her smarmily dashing new boss because “he wants what’s mine.” For all her earlier skittishness, it takes but one fancy dinner and some selfless cunnilingus for Anastasia to admit that she’s ready to return to the Grey side. Needless to say, there wouldn’t be much of a movie left if he honored these stipulations and refitted the Red Room of Pain with some comfy ivory banquettes and a selection of Pottery Barn’s finest throw cushions. Does she feel likewise, though? Despite the distraction of a dreamy new job as assistant to dreamier publishing house editor Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), she does - with the wan caveat that their reconciliation proceed with “no rules, no punishment and no more secrets.” “I want you back,” he tells her bluntly, somewhat surprisingly not cuing an angsty The Weeknd cover of the Jackson 5 hit on the film’s trigger-happy pop soundtrack. It’s been three weeks since Anastasia and Christian called off their arrangement (“relationship” is too lofty a term for its first iteration), and apparently much soul-searching, troubled sleeping and pensive pacing across marble floors has taken place in the interim. The original novel, for all its stylistic ineptitude, likewise works better as a self-contained narrative than as a franchise-starter: Once shy Anastasia ( Dakota Johnson), tested to her limits by the brand of possessive S&M wielded by Christian Grey ( Jamie Dornan), resolves that she’s better off as her own woman, continuing their romance entails doubling back on a lot of good character work.īut there’s money to be made and fans to be serviced, and so “Fifty Shades Darker” is here to - in the words of Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” covered in Corinne Bailey Rae’s dulcet greige tones over the opening credits - take us back to the start. With a brusque farewell as the elevator doors clamped shut, ending a long, tortured romantic negotiation on the chilliest of notes, “Fifty Shades of Grey” pulled off what might have been one of the great modern Hollywood endings - if not for the assured knowledge that a sequel was coming down the pike to undo its decisive snap. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sure to make Grey at the Valentine’s Day box office, “Darker” does almost nothing to fulfil the promise of its title, but it’s still diverting, sleekly styled and just sexy enough to frighten a few frigid horses. So it’s perhaps unfair to knock James Foley’s serviceable, lip-glossed sequel merely for delivering what might have reasonably been expected in the first place: an expensively scented two-hour soapdown, interspersed with some light erotic frisking, all administered very much with the original author’s sticky-fingered touch. Smartly gutting James’s viscous purple prose for something more curt and witty, it was one of the great pleasant surprises in recent studio moviemaking. James, she might have been less disappointed in life - though in her first film outing, 2015’s slinky schlockbuster “Fifty Shades of Grey,” director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel also aspired to a higher standard. “I was reading Austen and Brontë and no one ever measured up to that,” says Anastasia Steele of her romantic history near the beginning of “ Fifty Shades Darker.” Had she only been reading E.L. ![]()
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