James Foley’s follow-up to 2015’s erotic schlockbuster lacks its predecessor’s surprising, feminine sass, but succeeds on its most superficial terms.

“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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

But 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,” c.............

Read More: http://abspad.com/film-review-fifty-shades-darker/

I had enough of fifty shades

cyber5:
I had enough of fifty shades

Lolz, you've got one more installment coming your way.

#fiftyshadesfreed