50 Shades of Shocked

Rating: 4/10 (16 March 2015)

Let's be honest people, we were all going into Fifty Shades of Grey ready to hate it. Hell, I was damn near excited to go in there and tear it apart and laugh my ass off at how bad it would be. And surprisingly, I was wrong, kinda?
Imagine a world in which this movie was fully original, not based off of a book, not based off a book based off Twilight. I think we could all probably agree that the average rating would be much higher on here. Yes, this movie is pretty damn bad. But, if you pay close enough attention, it is almost self aware. You can almost get the sense that it is saying "yes, I know everyone is going to hate me. So lets have a ball making this movie." You can tell in the performance by Dakota Johnson that she certainly had this mindset, as did the line delivery called for by the screenplay.
However, the problem with the movie's self awareness is that while in it's delivery it says a big F you to the audience, it doesn't stretch far enough to make it what we all actually wanted from the movie, and that is the kinkiness. Stop lying to yourself, you know exactly why you saw Fifty Shades of Grey. You wanted to know if the BDSM scenes were as hot and steamy as everyone talked them up to be, and if you are like me, you can agree in saying that you were disappointed by how unsexy the sex scenes were. If this was not Fifty Shades of Grey, I don't think the un-sexiness would exactly be an issue, but as I said, you are seeing this movie for a reason, and it is not all that exciting.
I mean it, this movie really is not exciting, at all. Literally nothing happens. The entire time as we watch Ana decide if she will sign the contract, Christian does the exact opposite of what he says he is going to do as her dominant and takes her on a ton of cute dates and spoons her at night. So basically, the movie's logic does not make any sense. However, I cannot say I was surprised at all by how empty the mid to long 130 minute run time was since it was based off of Twilight. It is extremely obvious how directly inspired by the saga the author was, and it actually gets fun watching how related it is (50 Shades Drinking Game: Take a shot anytime there is a resemblance to Twilight. I promise you will be passed out by the end of the night!). So many parallels can be drawn that the boring screenplay becomes predictable because the characters and the actions they take are essentially the same.
But I have to say the single thing I was most surprised by from this movie is how well it is shot and directed. There is not a single scene that stands out as being anything less than great actually. It has a clean, dark, crisp, sexy look to it. However, the screenplay is not enough to match its greatness and all add up to be a successful movie.
Throughout this review, I talked as though I liked this movie, and believe me that is not the case whatsoever. I am in no way saying that this movie is good. All I am saying is that it needs to be looked at two ways, once as attached to the idea of 50 Shades of Grey, which will turn out to be actually not that bad, but disappointingly unkinky because of its reputation. The other is as a stand alone movie, and in that case it is seen as boring as hell. Self-aware or not, the movie should have chosen one of these goals to go for, and made it better. To hoping that the next film is more entertaining (be it even more self aware and funny, or actually significantly better in merit) I give Fifty Shades of Grey a 73/C.