50 Shades of Grey (2015) - Review

This movie is complete smut!

Just kidding.  Well, I mean, not really; this movie is unnecessarily trashy and immensely stupid, but I don’t find it immoral in the slightest.  Never mind the complete absurdity of finding a movie immoral or somehow a slight against your unfailing religion, but I’m not really sure how anybody can be upset with this movie (or the book, if it’s anything like this).  All that’s here is some soap-opera-level melodrama, some of the worst dialogue ever put to screen, and a heap of incredibly tame middle-aged woman porn.

Miss Anastasia Steele is but a meek college student when she is thrust into the intimidating arms of none other than Christian Grey, financial wunderkind and secretly depraved sadomasochist.  Sure, Grey is a complete tool and more than a little creepy, but of course Steele wants to bang him because... he shows a direct interest in her?  Because her other male friend is a date-rapist?  And she’s meek.  Oh so very meek.  Do not forget about the meekness.

And that’s all your really need for a synopsis – it was good enough for E.L. James, after all.  The rest is typical romance tropes with a dash of BDSM thrown in to “spice” up the proceedings.  The outrage for this movie is fairly surprising considering the most graphic thing they ever do is some light whip-play.  No, the most offensive aspect of this movie by far is the absolutely horrendous dialogue.  I assume a lot of lines are from the book because they are beyond stilted and violently forced into surrounding dialogue that doesn’t sound like it was regurgitated from a machine built to understand and replicate basic human communication.

In fact, the writing is awful when it comes to direct quotes from the book (because E.L. James is very clearly insane), but surprisingly better (read: dull, but less batshit stupid) when the screenwriter deviates from that hot mess of a novel.  Some of the better (read: funnier) bits include:

“I don’t make love.  I fuck – hard.”

“I’m 50 shades of fucked-up.”

“You're here because I'm incapable of leaving you alone.”

Our hero, everybody!  The actors can’t save this stuff, although Dakota Johnson does her damnedest to make Anastasia a likable and relatable character when clearly the writing cannot do so.  Jamie Dornan... not so much.  It's all he can do to exist in the film without the crewmen mistaking him for a tripod stand.  Actually, I'm still not convinced that they didn't motion-capture a tripod stand and CGI an attractive male lead on top of it.

This premise could be fine with a good writer if it focused on the more psychological aspects of Grey’s childhood molestation.  Yeah, I didn’t know it got that dark either.  That’s the kind of movie they should have gone with – really delve into this guy’s perversions and his guilt about being molested when he was young and how his fetish is some sort of coping mechanism.

But nah, this movie is just kind of boring.  Why have a good story when you can have Jamie Dornan feathering Dakota Johnson in the most fey manner imaginable.  Very domineering.