Review of Fifty Shades Darker (2017) by Whitmorgan7 — 10 Mar 2017

Okay, I know I am one of those people who go pay to watch “porn” in public, but for the sake of the reviews I felt like this was an important one. Who am I kidding? I love these movies with all their cheap, tacky, cheesy qualities. I’m a sucker for the books and the movies, even though they aren’t wonderful. So I took myself and my best friend for a girls night out the night this movie came out and reveled in all of it’s glory.

I was mostly excited for this movie because I really enjoyed the second book, more-so than the first one. There was more of a story, and it was a bit more realistic given some of the qualities of the movies. We start off in this movie after Anastasia and Christian have broken up after the events in the last movie. She is definitely not over the situation(and how hot Mr. Grey is) and is avoiding all of Christian’s attempts to win her back. Finally, they meet up at Jose’s art gallery, where he weirdly enough has photos of Ana up everywhere. Let’s be real, Christian isn’t the real creep here, Jose is. Anyway, Christian buys all of the photos and asks Ana out for dinner, to which she agrees because when Christian Grey aka Jamie Dornan asks you out to dinner, you say yes.

From dinner we see them start up their relationship again, slowly at first, and then very quickly falling back into the couple they were. They attend masquerade balls together, go to dinner, fall in love, basically they do everything that normal couples do in years in a matter of a couple of weeks.

Ana starts a new job at a publishing firm and we meet Jack Hyde, her new boss. He’s creepy and is supposed to be kind of an ugly, old guy, but they definitely did not stick to the script. While Eric Johnson was definitely creepy and made me uncomfortable, he wasn’t hard to look at. There are tensions between Ana and Hyde from the beginning, and even more tension between Hyde and Christian. Hyde makes it seemingly impossible to work for him and even more impossible to feel comfortable. Throughout the film we also meet Mrs. Robinson who Kim Basinger so eloquently brought to life. She was who I pictured when reading the book, and she made her on screen counterpart just as devious as she was in the book. Rita Ora was an odd choice for me as Mia, but I was pleasantly surprised by the choice. I imagined Mia with a more youthful, innocent presence.

Let’s talk about sex, baby. No, but for real. Let’s talk about the sex in this movie. I don’t care what anyone says about how bad the movies are, the sex is good. At least in this one. There isn’t a lot of the BDSM that made so many people so uncomfortable and outraged in the first one. I personally was the most excited for the elevator scene, and I think it did it justice. There were some laughable intimate moments, of course the movies are kind of cheesy and not the books weren’t very well written to begin with. But I love that even in those moments, the actors don’t break character.

My final thoughts, because I don’t want to give up any spoilers as usual, are on all of the lipstick they put on Dakota Johnson. I’m halfway convinced this movie was just a really long lipstick ad and I am LIVING for it. I have went as far as I can and have written down every lipstick type and shade she has on in that movie to buy. I need them all and I’m convinced that if she can wear them while being as risque and fabulous as she is, then I can wear them sitting in my office at my desk. But that could also be the part of me that thinks Dakota Johnson is the most perfect human being in the entire world. As far as a side by side comparison to the book, there were a few semi-important scenes left out, and a few things were different, but overall it stands up next to its literary counterpart pretty well. I know most people hate these movies and love to laugh at them, or do like my sister and watch them on Crappy Movie Monday, but I can’t help but love them. I will watch it again, and I will revel in its terrible glory all over again.