A movie this bad deserves to have its flaws enunciated clearly, so what follows is one in a periodic series of spoilereviews. (Past examples of the genre included Lucy, Fantastic Four, The Happening, and The Gunman.) Those who would prefer to avoid spoilers should stop reading now; those who want a sense of the awfulness to come, or would rather spend a few minutes reading about that awfulness than two hours experiencing it firsthand, read on.

1. A brief catchup for those joining the story midstream. In the last movie, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson), a virginal 21-year-old college student, was swept off her feet by Christian (Jamie Dornan), a 27-year-old billionaire entrepreneur with the abs of an underwear model. An S&M enthusiast, he made her sign a contract to be his “submissive.” Eventually, after a lot of tame bondage sex and one serious whipping, she left him.

2. Which brings us to the present film. Ana, now graduated, has just gotten a job as an assistant at an independent Seattle book publisher. Accordingly, she receives a couple of dozen stunning white roses from Christian in congratulation. She briefly contemplates throwing them out, then changes her mind and keeps them. Get used to this particular two-step when it comes to Ana’s tentative gestures toward almost-independence.

3. Ana attends a photography exhibition by a friend, José (Victor Rasuk), only to find that, to her surprise, it is filled with wall-sized portraits of herself.

3a. This is a good moment to note that virtually all the men in this movie are gross (even when they’re not presented as such) and treat Ana as an object. José is a perfect example. In theory, he’s supposed to be a good guy. Yet he fills his show with pictures of Ana without her knowledge or permission and then sells them for his own considerable profit. Who knows what kind of pervy stalker might be buying those prints?

4. Well, we do, of course: It’s Christian. He shows up at the exhibit, buys all the photos, and begs Ana to go to dinner with him. She agrees, “but only because I’m hungry.” At the restaurant, when he orders steak for her, she contradicts him and asks for the quinoa salad instead. This will prove to be one of vanishingly few occasions on which she gets what she wants, rather than putting up token resistance and then letting Christian have his way.

5. Ana explains that she left him following last movie’s whipping in his Red Room of Pain, because “you were getting off on the pain you inflicted.” I feel obligated to note that this is the exact phrasing used by Steve Martin in the song “Dentist!” from Little Shop of Horrors, making Christian literally a knockoff of a parody of a sadist.

6. Nonetheless, Ana is clearly warming back up. It seems to help that after the dinner date, Christian gives her a brand-new iPhone and MacBook, as if he were some creepy blend of Santa Claus and Steve Jobs.