Fifty Shades Darker gets a pummelling from the world's film critics

It seems that the critics were left neither moved nor aroused. Fifty Shades Darker, the second film adaptation of EL James’s bestselling novels, has been billed as a steamier sequel to 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey, but reviewers have condemned it as a distinctively unsexy affair.

In a critical pummelling possibly fitting for a film centred on sadomasochistic tendencies in the bedroom, Rolling Stone did not even venture as far as awarding it an entire star, giving it just 0.5 out of five.

“What an incredibly, indelibly idiotic movie,” wrote Peter Travers. “It’s a beast of roaring stupidity that devours everything in its path, including the veteran filmmaker.”

The film sees Dakota Johnson once again playing the bookish, virginal Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan portraying Christian the tortured multimillionaire who leads her astray, but a dispute over creative control led to the departure of Sam Taylor-Wood, who directed Fifty Shades of Grey, and Kelly Marcel who wrote the script. This time the screenplay was penned by EL James’s husband, Niall Leonard, while James Foley, known for films such as Glengarry Glen Ross, took over as director.

According to the Guardian, it is not a change that proved successful. “The only thing aroused by this headache of a movie is a desire to see Sam Taylor-Johnson back at the reins,” said Catherine Shoard in her one-star review.

She also lamented the unadventurous way the film grappled with the sexual content, which is supposed to fuel the film’s drama and was central to the book, selling million of copies.

Shoard found the scenes “steamy as a greasy spoon and almost as erotic”. “Fifty Shades’s chief way of proving how dirty it is seems to be making its stars take endless showers – which inevitably leads to more sex, and so a terrible cycle of shagging and washing.”

Robbie Collin, writing for the Telegraph, had a similar complaint, though he gave the film a comparably generous two stars.

“While the sex scenes are stylish enough – though they lack the marble-cold, sculptural feel of the first film’s – would I sound like a ravening pervert if I complained they didn’t go quite far enough, or that there weren’t enough of them?”

For the New Yorker, the film was offensive not for overtly sexual content but for the reductive way it portrayed the male and female relationship in the film. “The film’s bland impersonality is grotesque; its element of pornography isn’t in its depiction of sex but in its depiction of people, of relationships, of situations that, for all their unusualness, bear a strong psychological and societal resonance.”

According to the Independent, Fifty Shades Darker was simply “an ordeal to watch not because of its gothic eroticism but because of its utter blandness.

“When the inevitable spanking scene takes place, it is tongue in cheek (although not quite literally so).”

Even more scathing was the Daily Mirror. “If you want to watch a movie about a billionaire playboy with a penchant for darkness, inflicting violence and dressing up in masks, you’re far better off seeing The Lego Batman Movie.”