2 hours of nothing

Rating: 4/10 (10 January 2016)

Fifty Shades of Grey was always going to be terrible. Unsurprisingly, it is terrible, yet it could have been worse. In contrast to Bella Swan (FSOG originated as Twilight fan fiction), the heroine may not be a brilliantly written character but Dakota Johnson does an unexpectedly good job. Sam Taylor-Johnson directs the movie well and the cinematography has a certain style to it. The soundtrack isn't the worst either. But don't think for a moment I'm defending this. It's not the utter, complete, irredeemable failure it may have been, but it's still a failure. Slow, airless, boring, plot free and devoid of any compelling narrative arc, it's difficult to see a point to this movie. The sex scenes, surely? Well, they don't take up that much of the film and much of it is... nothing really. There's no chemistry between the lead actors and Jamie Dornan gives a wooden, charisma free performance. Plus, it's in many ways a fairly tasteless and sexist film with many highly uncomfortable moments.
So, the question still remains. What is this? Is it a porn movie? Well, no since the sex scenes don't take up that much of the film and they're not as strong as many were evidently hoping. Is it a character study? Well, some more character depth would have been appreciated. Despite the occasional interesting lines, mostly the characters are two dimensional so no. Is it a romantic drama? It's about as romantic as a torture porn horror film due to its lack of passion and emotion so definitely not. Is it an erotic thriller? Well, if you want thrills you won't get a single one, while it's really not that erotic, so again no. It doesn't even have a proper ending. It doesn't feel complete, it's outrageously, obscenely overlong at 2 hours and in general it's just a total bore. That's what FSOG is. A bore. Now we have 2 sequels to look forward to despite the fact that if you reduced the movie to its amount of actual story it'd be 15 minutes long. Overall, a dud although at least it's not as bad as Terminator Genesys.
4/10