Fifty Shades of Grey

0.5 Stars (out of four)

So, the worldwide publishing sensation became an erotic movie, but I have never seen an erotic movie that was so unerotic in my life. It's a lot like Showgirls in that it tries to be a very titallating film that transcends its obvious erotic overtones into something greater. And, also like Showgirls, it fails in truly spectacular fashion. But unlike Showgirls, a film "so bad it's good," Fifty Shades of Grey is one of those singularly bad films you hear about occasionally. There is absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, remotely redeeming, entertaining or even arousing about this film.

The movie opens with our heroine, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) an oh, so lovable and precocious young college girl who ends up interviewing Christian Grey (Jaime Dornan) for her college newspaper. After what is probably one of the dumbest and clumsiest meet-cute scenes ever, our hero Christian MUST have our heroine Ana. What then follows is over two hours of some of the dullest and silliest crap ever committed to celluloid until Ana realizes she's not happy and SPOILER ALERT leaves Christian.

For a movie that is ostensibly based on one of the more sexually-charged novels of our time, the heat and excitement level of the film is pretty flat. For those who grew up on the late 80's/early 90's, this movie is almost a caricature of every Zalman King softcore movie you ever saw on Cinemax after midnight. This movie evoked images from everything from 9 1/2 Weeks to Wild Orchid to Two Moon Junction to The Red Shoe Diaries. But unlike those that came before, Fifty Shades is too pompous and grandiose for its own good. The Zaman King ouvier was beautifully shot, but ultimately dumb sex fantasies that never really took themselves too seriously. Fifty Shades is actually trying to be something more, a feminist sexual manifesto perhaps? The books make constant references to Ana's "inner Giddess" that was set free when Christian takes her virginity. She is a big girl now, a member of the sisterhood of the sexually active in good standing. The movie tries to replicate this with visual clues, the most striking is how much better her wardrobe gets the more sex she has. Her dresses get nicer and tartier the further down the rabbit hole she goes. These are not dresses a well-adjusted woman wears, but rather one who is advertising she is ready to have sex, almost like a prostitute. Ana goes from a clumsy, frumpy girl in a ponytail to a smoldering, confident object of sexual lust because of the virile man. But the funny thing about it is that if you take Christian's youth and billions away and put the character in a trailer park, this is just another episode of Law & Order: SVU.

Now, I understand there is a fantasy element at work here. When I was in my 20's, the big panty-burning story was Indecent Proposal. Every woman I knew wanted to be Demi Moore in that movie, to be Robert Redford's whore. But the basic story is exactly the same. Once you strip away the veneer of beauty and money, it comes down to a man treating a woman as a hooker. This is not healthy.

Beyond that, Dakota Johnson is chewing the scenery so badly I'm surprised there weren't bite marks on the drapes as well. She seems to take her cues from a Jennifer Aniston's Rachel character from Friends: constant fidgeting, coy sideways glances mixed with direct dead stares; combined with an incessant need to coquettishly clear her throat. 50 Shades has all the drama of an after-school special with boobies. Dornan isn't much better. All he does is blankly stare with a hint of a frown. I think it's meant to convey a mysteriousness or even a little danger; but in reality, he just looks like he just smelled a bad fart and is trying to figure where it came from...FOR THE ENTIRE MOVIE. I actually don't blame him for this. This is just bad writing and direction. I guess the movie is trying to tell us that Ana needed to become a sexually active WOman, and with this new-found confidence mixed with innocent naïveté, she finally knows that Christian is a horrible person. But, in the end, she can't let go because we now have the sequel...

Finally, this movie can't figure out what it wants to be. Is it an erotic fantasy or a feminist declaration about a woman exploring her budding sexuality on her own terms? Either way, I have never seen an erotic film go so far out of its way to be unerotic. The sex scenes are campy and laughable. The only one with some tepid warmth to it is actually the first, "vanilla" sex scene. Everything else comes across as staged and flat, devoid of any passion or heat. Compare this movie to Unfaithful, Body Heat or The Last Seduction and you will see the difference. Instead, we are treated to red hot scenes of drawing up a contract to define the terms of their dom/sub relationship. The scene where our heroes sit in a boardroom to discuss the terms of acceptable limits is supposed to be hot, I think, but just comes across as being unintentionally hilarious. So, I can find absolutely no redeeming things about this movie. It is not erotic. The characters are two-dimensional and boring. The story is told at a breakneck pace that resembles on snail overdosed on Valium. I was looking at my watch around 95 minutes in and realizing, with horror, I still had 40 to go. The story is contrived, disjointed and fragmented. And worst of all, there is absolutely nothing endearing about either of the leads. He is creepy, a stalker, damaged and a bit rapey. She is empty-headed and keeps coming back for more, which makes it hard to sympathize or empathize in her plight. Basically, this movie is, in a word...

DUMB. Avoid at all costs unless you are also masochistic like Ana.