FIFTY SHADES DARKER

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS OUCH PHWOOOOAR

Here we go again.... The middle section of the Fifty Shades Trilogy really is more of the same: bigger, raunchier, sillier, softer. While the original film was little more than a Pretty Woman poor-girl-rich-boy romance with tasteful lighting and music choices to dilute the depravities we weren't really shown anyway, Part Two ups the frank nudity factor (at last there's some meat to go with the cheese) but descends into so much absurdity and terrible dialogue that you expect the theme from Dynasty or Falcon Crest to erupt at half a dozen particularly gigglesome moments. Maybe it's unfair for me to pick holes in the Fifty Shades movies given that, like the Twilights or the Star Wars prequels, I'm not the target audience. This isn't a blokey film about bonking, it's a girlie film about lurve; a sweet and sentimental fairytale, albeit one in which Prince Charming likes to tie Cinderella to the bedpost and spank her with a table tennis bat. It's Beauty And The Beast, except he's ugly on the inside and America's Next Top Adonis on the outside.

Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) may have walked away from multi-billionaire Christian at the end of the first movie, but he can't let go: pining for her in his cavernous penthouse and plotting to win her back (apparently by shelling out money left and right in the belief this will impress her). His sexual hangups are all down to his backstory of abuse and mother issues, but he's trying to put it all behind him for Anastasia, even if it's just with apparently fantastic regular sex rather than cable ties and whips. But he's too controlling, too stifling - he buys the publishing house where she has her dream job, he won't let her go to New York for work because he's jealous of her boss (of course, it's fine for him to go off on business trips). Even when it looks like they're finally together and he pops the question, Kim Basinger is lurking around trying to break them up....

Fifty Shades Darker is a very silly episode of a very silly soap opera with dialogue George Lucas would have rolled his eyes at, and sex scenes that are franker than you'd expect at a multiplex these days, where an 18 certificate suddenly stands out amidst the 12A blandness. It's fairly painless and it looks nice, Danny Elfman has the soft strings going, and it's too silly to be either boring or offensive. Sure, you might want to read it as a film about emasculation - Christian Grey is giving up that very part of him that makes him what he is at the behest of a woman who's giving up very little in return, just as he was the one giving up control in the first film, the tagline of which was "Lose Control" - in which she's in charge, not the dominant sadist. It's still not very good though.

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