The Best Comedy of 2015 So Far

Rating: 3/10 (12 February 2015)

There were times during my (honestly more than a little intoxicated) viewing of "Fifty Shades of Grey" where the movie genuinely made me wonder if I was watching a parody of E.L. James' horrible book. The entire audience and I guffawed heartily at several of the early scenes, and I got the impression that we were all laughing with the film and not at it. Even more numerous were the times where I felt I was laughing AT it, and the times where I was so thoroughly baffled at the characters' actions and their development, or so massively bored by the tame and interminable scenes of protracted S&M, that I almost took a conscious decision to drink myself into a stupor and miss out on the ending; a big emotional moment that will probably lose what little meaning it has as soon as the inevitable sequel rolls around.
Inconsistency in tone is far from the only problem the film has, though. The borderline glorification of abusive relationships, poor acting, bad dialogue and a frankly (James got final say on the casting, after all) surprising lack of chemistry between the leads (Dornan is by far the biggest culprit here) certainly go a long way in making this film a lot more enjoyable at its worst, but the aforementioned boring bits are SO boring, and so unendingly devoted to the book, that whatever schadenfreude I got from them is simply insufficient for me to squeeze out an ironic recommendation. A saddening fact, because I could easily see myself endorsing an intentionally funny parody or an unintentionally hilarious slavish adaptation, but not a mismatched hybrid of both.
I have a feeling that the people involved in the making of this picture could have cooked up a pretty decent parody of the laughable new wave of "mommy porn" erotic novels that E.L. James inspired. As it stands, though, they crafted what is probably the single best adaptation that anyone could have possibly made from the source material.
Unfortunately, that is not saying much. At all.
Funny as hell, though. Even if I got more titillation out of Alexander Portnoy's liver episode.