A half decent book with an adaptation that fell flat

Rating: 3/10 (20 February 2015)

Bear in mind, I have read the books, and as an actual practitioner, I found the book and movie tame and repetitive. The books was poorly written, and in my opinion, even Meyers did a better job writing than James did, yet both of their work was considered "literature" in the modern sense. Way too many details were left out of the movie, and the pacing of the scenes was just weird. In all, I think Jamie Dornan did a reasonably good job (surprisingly) at portraying Christian, but Dakota Johnson need a body language lesson. It was said the two main actors don't actually get on very well in real life, and it really carried over into the film, because the chemistry was absent to make the D/S dynamic of the scenes work. On top of that, there were way too many Ana & Christian scenes in it, so much the other characters were more like they are making cameo appearances than anything else. There were few movies out there that I could not sit through to the end, and I was very tempted to walk out of this one. I did not go into the theatre with high expectation, and how right I was.