In 2015, Fifty Shades of Grey became a cultural punching bag. Critics hated it, audiences were divided, but the box office roared. Three years later, the inevitable sequel, Fifty Shades Darker , arrived with a new director (James Foley, replacing Sam Taylor-Johnson) and a promise to fix the original’s biggest flaw: the lack of a real relationship.

Fifty Shades Freed would arrive a year later, promising a wedding and a final dose of melodrama. But after Darker , it was clear: this franchise had already lost its luster.

Jamie Dornan, meanwhile, remains frustratingly miscast. He looks the part of a billionaire Adonis, but his performance is a collection of tics: the lip bite, the furrowed brow, the monotone whisper. When he says, “I’m damaged, Ana. Fifty shades of damaged,” it lands less like a confession and more like a reading from a greeting card.

Their intimate scenes are also strangely sterile. Despite being marketed as “darker” and “sexier,” the film is notably less explicit than its predecessor. The BDSM elements are almost entirely sidelined in favor of conventional romantic montages: cooking breakfast, dancing in the rain, and a strangely chaste bathtub scene. For a franchise built on the promise of boundary-pushing erotica, Darker is surprisingly tame. Let’s be honest: Fifty Shades Darker is not a good movie. The dialogue is laughable. The product placement (a very long close-up of a Bose speaker, a Porsche that gets more screen time than some actors) is shameless. And the dramatic climax—involving a helicopter crash, a villain with a gun, and a last-minute rescue—is so absurdly over-the-top that it feels like a rejected Days of Our Lives script.