This Valentine's Day, save yourself from Fifty Shades Darker.
The sequel to 2015's erotic thriller, also based on the novel by E.L. James, hits theaters this weekend, has a whopping 12% on Rotten Tomatoes currently and has met the media's lukewarm expectations.
What are critics saying? See for yourself below.
SEE ALSO:Ellen DeGeneres and Jamie Dornan turn up the heat in an office supply bondage seshUSA Today's Brian Truitt was quick to declare that the sequel is worse than its "stupefyingly bad" predecessor.
Johnson still hasn’t found the right role to showcase her skills because this surely isn't it. Dornan is quite talented — as anybody who’s watched the British TV show The Fall can attest — but he inexplicably loses his mojo in these movies. Together? Well, any pair of fish lying next to each other at Seattle’ famed Pike Place Market have more chemistry.
Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly:
[Screenwriter Niall] Leonard sticks much closer to his wife’s original goofy plot, and the result is a bland story that never really commits to what it wants to be. Part romance, part thriller, and part soap opera, Darker never does any of those genres particularly well, instead delivering a softcore Hallmark Channel movie that’s neither sexy enough to be exciting nor campy enough to be any fun.
Tom Gliatto, People:
Fifty Shades Darker is possibly worse, and dumber, than 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey, or possibly not. Determining the degree of plus or minus here is pretty much the same as trying to define the point at which a dominant-submissive could be said to be really dominant or really submissive. You’re just jumping through hoops — spiked, leather hoops.
John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter:
How can the filmmakers keep a straight face when they have Anastasia complaining about Christian's desire to "own" her and then, barely two scenes later, show her agog at a closet full of designer gowns and lingerie? Blindfolds and tasteful wrist restraints are just this year's superficial twist on the Cinderella story. Fifty Shadesmay take pains not to let Anastasia actually accept anything as gauche as cash for the body she hands over so willingly to her prince, as Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman. But it's hard to pretend this represents any meaningful step toward a future feminists can be proud of.
If you do see the movie, you may agree with Vanity Fair's Jordan Hoffman, who appreciated the movie for the "trash masterpiece" it is:
With anyone else in the lead, these films would be condemned and sent to Guantanamo. Instead, we’ve got the greatest Valentine’s Day movie in years. The sequel works because its creators didn’t set out to make camp; they were simply true to the source material, with few airs about making great art.
Once you know that, you may even enjoy it -- like Variety's Guy Lodge:
For all its structural and psychological deficiencies, it’s hard not to enjoy Fifty Shades Darkeron its own lusciously limited terms...Foley’s return to the big screen shows some of his velvety class as a trash stylist. He doesn’t approach the plentiful sex scenes, in particular, with quite as much crisp ingenuity as [Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam] Taylor-Johnson did, but with cinematographer John Schwartzman slathering on the satin finish by the bucketful, they more than suffice as coffee-table titillation. If anything, the film is most seductive outside of either the bedroom or the Red Room, when it succumbs to the sheer lifestyle porn of overly art-directed Venetian parties and platinum Monique Lhuillier gowns.
Fifty Shades Darkeris in theaters Feb. 10.
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