This is a chaste age at the cinema. La La Land may be sold on its leads’ sizzling chemistry, but Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone remain strictly zipped throughout. Film fans in search of titillation are unlikely to be sated by Loving’s snuggles or Moonlight’s angsty, unseen intimacy. In tilting for Oscars, contenders are emulating the statuettes’ anatomy.
Enter Fifty Shades Darker, the second instalment of EL James’s shamelessly mainstream sadomasochist romance. Finally, a funnel for all that lust.
But the only thing aroused by this headache of a movie is a desire to see Sam Taylor-Johnson back at the reins. Somehow, in 2015, she transformed James’s appalling porn into something watchable. She coached charming performances from Dakota Johnson as bookish graduate Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as deranged but dishy billionaire Christian Grey. She then departed the franchise, apparently in reaction to the author’s whip-cracking. In her place: the slavish duo of James Foley (House of Cards) as director and Niall Leonard (Mr EL James, coincidentally) in charge of the script.
Submission might turn on our hero – and, perhaps, his creator – but it does not make for a gripping film. The plotless pant of the novel is faithfully recreated, as Christian wins Anastasia back by renouncing bondage unless she’s really, really up for it, then various peripheral figures – a former submissive, old flame Kim Basinger, Anastasia’s hot rotter of a boss – try to force them apart.