If you’re going to seeing a movie like 50 Shades of Black then you have to also know what kind of movie this will be. With past movies like A Haunted House and A Haunted House 2 Marlon Wayans has taken the spoof genre and tried to make it his own. Sadly Marlon only works well in spoof movies when he’s with his brothers Keenan Ivory Wayans and Shawn Wayans.
Much like in his previous en devours, 50 Shades of Black is a spoof of the movie 50 Shades of Grey which I would regard as a spoof of story telling in general, because it’s horrible. The movie is an almost shot for shot remake of 50 Shades of Grey with Wayans playing Christian Black and Kali Hawk playing Hannah Steele, his love interest. 50 Shades of Black is like the bell that rings in Improv class to make you come up with a new line. In this case all the lines try to be funny, but fall flat. Wayans version of the main character reverts to the go to joke of him being a rich black man because of drugs and when you meet his parents, they’re a white couple who have adopted different race children and come off as horrible ignorant. When it comes to Hannah she plays her character as she would in the book, but her backstory has her mother playing a slutty woman giving Hannah multiple possible fathers. I really had hoped Affion Crockett would have had a bigger part, because he was actually really funny in the Haunted House movies.
Funny isn’t what I would describe this movie as, because even though a foundation was already there nothing seemed to be built on it. The movie didn’t hook you right away with something funny, like in Haunted House 2, and the jokes were so far apart that even if you chuckled or smiled it would be a good 5-10 minutes before it happened again. In my opinion Marlon Wayans should stick to movies where they are cut into short skit segments.