50 Ways to Bruise Your Lover

Rating: 4/10 (24 February 2015)

This film is not recommended. (Rating: ☆☆ out of 4)
In brief: 50 ways to bruise your lover...and an audience as well.
GRADE: C
Floggers ready...it's time to beat a dead horse! 50 Shades of Grey has arrived, a guilty pleasure that quickly becomes a guiltless displeasure.
But first, let me digress...Years ago, my sweet elderly mother drove out-of-town to see the racy Saturday Night Fever, a popular R-rated film. Her desire to see this film proved greater than her actual enjoyment but, at least, she was able to experience it first hand and no one she knew would know her dirty little secret. Her reputation remained purloined and intact. I bring this up as that film was nearly forty years ago and not much has changed with the latest sexual romp being Fifty Shades of Grey. The beat (or the beatings) goes on, even with its wall-to-wall contemporary pop soundtrack.
￼We now return to our regular scheduled review: Fifty Shades of Grey is a dull boring affair. The sex on screen is strictly rote, badly wrote. Most of this carnal action has been seen countless times in other sex films. You know the routine: quick cuts of breasts, rears, and even quicker glimpses of genitalia interspersed with arched backs and stylized poses in various states of undress, all looking for unattainable ecstasy. The sex is sanitized for the masses. After all, it has a R-rating. It's the softest of soft porn.
Fifty Shades of Grey celebrates sexual diversity while condemning that sexual choice with Puritan fanaticism. It's smug, condescending, and pure fantasy. The filmmakers plays both sides hoping men can relate to that male dominance angle while women can empathize with their sensual desires. (I won't get into the debate of degrading women or the issue of sexual domination and violence. This film degrades mankind in its silly treatment and romantic disillusion of pleasure and pain.)
￼James Dornan and Dakota Johnson play the mismatched lovers, Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. Grey is handsome, sexy, and rich. He is "the world's most eligible billionaire bachelor". Ana is a young awkward and naive virgin, ready to be plucked and educated in the fine art of lovemaking. They stare longingly at each other. They breathe heavily and talk dirty. They strip down often, moping more than groping. The endless droning and groaning at the height of their sexual passions is repeated often between their trips to the infamous "red" room, a private boudoir filled with the all of the latest S&M equipment that money can buy. Ana continually bites her lips. Christian plays the piano whenever he needs a Zen moment since he never can crack a smile. He showers his pretty woman with expensive gifts and demands of obedience. She complies. And so it goes. On and on.
Their mating dance becomes downright laughable. and their dialog is just awful. The actors are so intense and deadly serious, uttering this nonsense with every spoken sentence ending in large exclamation points. Both Mr. Dorman and Ms. Johnson are physically attractive performers, but their acting never rises to any level of reality. That they were able to say their lines with the straightest of faces, at least, shows some acting restraint. (I wish them all the luck in the future with more challenging roles than these one-dimensional characters allow.)
￼The director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, does an adequate job, but she seems as obsessed with the excesses of Mr. Grey's vast empire as our darling Anastasia. This is a big budget picture after all, even if there is no real money shot. The director carefully places her camera strategically out of view of any male frontal views. (But there is still a fleeting glimpse of Ms. Johnson's private area that goes pubic, I mean public. So much for woman's liberation.)
As Mr. Grey so eloquently states at one point in the movie, "I'm fifty shades of f**ked up." So is this movie.
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