Movie Review: 50 Shades of Grey

After much vaunted hype and hate, we have finally arrived at the 50 Shades of Grey film. With an inbuilt audience, whether this film was going to make money was never in question, however the burning question is – was it any good?

In case you’ve been living under a rock, here is story in a nutshell Literature student Anastasia Steele's (Dakota Johnson) life changes forever when she meets handsome, yet tormented, billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). Having glanced briefly at the book and the good/bad/naughty parts – depending on where your tastes lay – so this won’t be a book v film comparison and nor should it, the film is an adaptation.

We are quickly thrown into the first meeting between the messy, anxious Ana and the very together Christian, the two leads do manage to create some intensity and chemistry, unfortunately that goes missing for the rest of the film when they really need it. Dakota Johnson does a fine job as Ana, her mannerisms and the quite natural way she plays the character make her easy to watch, she can definitely act. Dornan’s Grey…is either hamstrung by his dialogue (which is a problem throughout the film for just about everyone) or by the way he chose to play him. He is stilted in his delivery which I think harks back to the lack of chemistry, it’s difficult to convey that he wants/needs Ana when everything he does seems so very clunky.

Sam Taylor-Johnson directs the film adequately not trying anything that outlandish (except for a helluva a lot of helicopter panning shots) which is a shame because the scenes in the red room could’ve done with some flourishes. I understand they wanted the film to be more accessible and thus have less explicit parts but however it lost a lot of impact, especially seeing all the equipment at their disposal in the red room. A braver decision would’ve been to go – pardon the pun – a bit harder in these scenes so the others scenes outside of the bedroom would have more resonance. Interestingly enough the scene in which the do go hard and actually get quite visceral has caused the most furore.

The story ends up going a little dark but it does so by going from zero to two hundred. There is barely a lead in to Grey’s dark secret or past and story didn’t build to that point, it just sailed along on the vanilla river it had created for itself. The film was too afraid to offend people nor did it want to titillate people too much, it tried playing both sides. I guess that was the issue I had most with the film, for a film that played mostly like a romantic drama/comedy it painted itself into a corner, so when the juicy stuff came along it to couldn’t escape or raise the film above the average.