Fifty Shades of Black is Marlon Wayans’ parody of the sexually-charged movie, Fifty Shades of Grey. In this parody, businessman Christian Black (Marlon Wayans) is looking to naïve reporter, Hannah (Kali Hawk) to be his sexual submissive.

Release Date: January 29, 2016
Writer: Rick Alvarez, Marlon Wayans
Director: Michael Tiddes
Cast: Marlon Wayans, Kali Hawk, Mike Epps, Affion Crockett, Jenny Zigrino

To say that Fifty Shades of Black is a bad movie is being kind. The movie suffers from being incredibly bland. It strings together a series of mediocre jokes using a fragile, if non-existent, storyline. The fact that this is a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey, the filmmakers use the storyline and structure of the film as a loose guide solely to get us from the beginning to the end of the movie.

It is almost not worth summarizing the story, but let’s try. Christian Black is a successful and mysterious millionaire, who has made his riches selling drugs and stealing everything. Hannah is a young ingénue, who interviews Black, when her nymphomaniac roommate is under-the-weather after a night of violent banging.

During the incredibly awkward interview, Christian is enamored by Hannah and offers to enter a business-like love relationship, which includes sessions in the playroom. If you’re familiar with Fifty Shades of Grey, you know where this is heading.

As a comedy, writers Rick Alvarez and Marlon Wayans basically took every scene from Fifty Shades of Grey and rewrote it by added a series of jokes and gags. The problem lies in that by adding jokes to a scene they managed to remove the parts of the story that leads you to the next scene. So while you might mildly laugh at the juvenile sex humor, you then wonder where is this movie going?

For example, the scene where Hannah is talking to her roommate Kateesha (Jenny Zigrino), about the interview with Christian Black. While Hannah is going over the questions, Kateesha can’t help but go on and one about her sexual encounter the night before that left her in this weakened state.

The other problem is the level of inconsistency in characters and in its storyline. It’s as if the filmmakers just want to throw jokes in your face hoping you’ll laugh at something. In one scene Christian is going to spank Hannah for some reason I can’t remember. The joke is Hannah butt is tight and as Christian spanks her, he is the one who feels pain in his hands. Later in the film, Hannah is being whipped on the rear and she feels pain. It’s as if they write these scenes completely independent of one another and are not concerned with how they match against each other.

Fifty Shades of Black is just a plain old bad movie. The original Fifty Shades of Grey was funnier because you had actors saying and doing the most ridiculous gags with a hilarious level of seriousness. In this movie, the actors are comedians both in on the joke and telling the jokes. Gags are shoved into scenes because they need gags. Laughs are childish, scatological and penis jokes.

3 out of 10