50 Shades of Paul Spector

Rating: 4/10 (22 February 2015)

Jamie Dornan is very pleasing on the eye, if not the ear, as his Northern Irish accent bubbled through most of his dialogue. I'm loathe to say anything bad as he is clearly a nice chap in real life but the fact of the matter was, he was weak as Christian. Dakota was OK as Ana but she seemed a little old, wiser than the Ana I had read and certainly more intelligent in vocabulary and wit. Their chemistry was OK but not steaming hot. Christian's family's airtime was mercifully short and completely miscast. Elliot is just not that hard looking and Rita Ora? Really? It was better written than the book - no inner goddess or "Oh mys" and I laughed a couple of times at things I knew weren't in the book. However, as is sadly often the case, my imagination and development of the characters in the book was really quite different to the way they were portrayed on the big screen. I didn't feel that Christian valued Ana as I had read, he didn't seem lost in wonderment at this beautiful creature or scared that she would bolt. He just seemed to want to get his end away! He was far more aggressive than I thought he should have been and I saw a 'rape-face' I had last seen on Jamie Dornan's visage playing the serial killer Paul Spector. From then on it was difficult to separate the two characters (beard or no beard). The scene where he follows Ana to Georgia as she's drinking Cosmopolitans with her mother was far too 'stalkery' and all I could think of was Patrick Bergin's character in Sleeping with the Enemy. Not a happy mix and certainly not the Christian Grey I imagined. Having said all that, I will buy the blu ray and I will watch it again, probably a lot more comfortably in my own home.