1.5/5
A movie this bad is not watched — it is felt on a cellular level. Like a socket wrench tightening a rusty bolt, Fifty Shades of Black mercilessly cranks the kaleidoscope of your existence until at some point, it occurs to you that you’re no longer just in a cinema; you’re stranded in a miserable exile not unlike the ultimate act of Quantum of Solace, abandoned in the middle of an ever-expansive desert scorch with nothing but a can of Pennzoil to quench your thirst.
Don’t believe me? Try it. See for yourself. Make no mistake, folks: this is no “movie parody”. This is a parody of the act of moviemaking, a film that holds its audience in such awe-inspiring contempt that simply sitting through it renders you complicit in some grand-scale practical joke. Well guess what? It ain’t funny. In a time when the cinematic landscape is more ripe for invention and innovation than ever before, here is a film (I use the term loosely) that sells the moviegoing public the comedic equivalent of creamed corn; there isn’t a morsel in it that doesn’t feel digested beyond anything approaching substance or consistency, let alone taste.
How do you mess this up? The source material, meaning both the novel Fifty Shades of Grey and the accompanying film adaptation from just last year, practically lampoons itself. Or is that precisely the problem? There isn’t a joke to be told about Fifty Shades that hasn’t passed its expiration date. But there’s a quite a penny to be made from people who, frankly, just don’t know any better. Judging from the screening I attended, those people hated it too. I call that justice.
I won’t bother with the plot. If you’ve seen or read Fifty Shades in any incarnation, you know the drill. Christian Grey is now Christian Black (Marlon Wayans) and Anastasia Steele is now Hannah Steele (Kali Hawk), and we follow them through various stages of S&M relationship. The main difference is that the soapy brooding has been swapped out for jokes about chewing on “outies”, curly-haired prop testes that beat like a throbbing vein, more descriptions of genital stench than you could ever ask for, and an arsenal of the kind of stale ethnic jokes you could find in fifteen-year-old reruns of Mad TV.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie more painfully desperate for a laugh. I might have been sad for it if it had shown me the slightest flicker of effort. The script doesn’t deploy a single joke that functions with mechanism, complexity, or wit. Instead, it throws so many things against the wall that every once and awhile, it stumbles upon a non-sequitur so completely from-the-aether that your only physiological response is a choke of laughter. That’s not humor. That’s probability.
“Ah, but Spencer,” you might be thinking, ”If a movie makes you laugh, has it not fulfilled its most rudimentary purpose? Has it not done the job?” Okay, fine. You wanna know what made me laugh? Let me save you the trouble of buying a movie ticket: late in the film, during a pointless parody of one of Magic Mike’s stripping scenes, we are treated to a shot of Marlon Wayans flossing his nethers with a towel before tossing it into the crowd, and the very next shot features a young girl suddenly getting slapped in the face by the excrement-soaked rag. There it is. I laughed. You got me, Damon. Kudos to you. As I type this review, I am on the phone RSVP’ing a front row seat to take in the shimmer of your smile as you accept your long-overdue Mark Twain Prize for American Comedy.
About two-thirds of the way through, the movie does something so egregious and cheap that even the most ardent Wayans fans should feel betrayed: rather than try to further invent jokes to skewer Fifty Shades of Grey, it instead chooses to have Wayans open up the original book and read lines and begins commenting on the terribly written dialog. Repeat after me: No. No no no no no no no. That isn’t just lazy— it’s a shameless admission of defeat. Wayans is announcing to the world that this imagination has sputtered out and hoping you’ll forgive him simply by virtue of the subject matter he’s tackling. Imagine for a moment if halfway through Young Frankenstein, Gene Wilder simply pulled out the script to the original Frankenstein films and started reciting lines.
Which brings us to the worst sin of all: the cast. The moment esteemed actors like Jane Seymour and Fred Willard showed up, I hung my head. It’s one thing to have Marlon Wayans here; he’s a gifted actor and a genuine comedic talent, but his presence in movies like this is nothing new. For everyone else, this movie is a permanent stain on an otherwise respectable repertoire.
Food for thought: four days before Fifty Shades of Black opened, Nat Turner’s film about slave rebellion,The Birth of a Nation, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City. It was an ambitious work about an important piece of American history written and directed by its star. Aside from securing the festivals top two awards, it was eventually picked up by Fox Searchlight Pictures for 17.5 million dollars, the biggest deal in Sundance History. That film pushes as many social and artist boundaries as one could ever hope for. Something like Fifty Shades of Black fixes them all with duct tape and Elmer’s glue.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]