★ ★ ★
Admit it, this title was just begging to happen, and dammit if one of the horde of Wayans didn’t rise to the occasion. Here it’s Marlon Wayans starring in this parody of the inexplicable softcore S&M phenomenon following the erotic education of naïve, college-aged virgin Hannah (Kali Hawk) under the tutelage of Christian Black (Wayans), a suave self-made millionaire who also does things like lick a piece of toast all over, front and back, before letting Hannah eat it. That’s just an aspect of his controlling, dominant nature, which also includes hiding in her laundry basket to keep an eye on her and demanding she sign a contract detailing what exactly he can and cannot do to her, such as whether he’s allowed to use the whip labeled “12 Years a Slave” on her, or just settle for the one marked “Roots.”
This is a silly, broad and extremely raunchy comedy with lots of swinging prosthetic body parts on display, including a very impertinent outie belly button that qualifies as new territory in erogenous zones. Wayans is believably suave as a multimillionaire sadist, but isn’t afraid to gurn or pratfall when the gag demands it. And Fifty Shades of Black distinguishes itself from the equally crude Dirty Grandpa in that its gags are just as vulgar but are never mean-spirited (the only person who comes off badly is E.L. James, whose best-selling work of “literature” is skewered in a scene where Christian reading it aloud is the worst torture Hannah is forced to endure). The screenplay only lightly touches on the idea of whips and chains as something that may have a complicated appeal for the descendants of slaves, but where its wisecracks could have drawn blood it settles instead for love taps.
The movie’s biggest problem is the thinness of its source material. It’s one thing to skewer an entire genre, as the Wayans did in Scary Movie or Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, but quite another to pick a single source to parody, and a very thin gruel of a source at that. They do their best by bolstering the main storyline with funny scenes that pick on movies like Whiplash and Magic Mike (including the movie’s best scene involving a TV mom of advanced age proving she’s a very, very good sport), but there just aren’t that many other S&M romantic dramas to lump into the mix. The laughs in Fifty Shades of Black do not come at a machine-gun clip like in Airplane!, and the movie could use at least one real gut-busting moment as a centerpiece, but the sporadic chuckles it provokes are real and deserved. Now let’s see what the Wayans clan can do with I Am Curious (Yellow), or Blue Velvet, or Behind the Green Door.