Justen Smith, Staff Writer
There is evidently a lot to be said when the most profitable movie of 2015 so far is the adaptation of what started out as a “Twilight” fan fiction. “Fifty Shades of Grey” chronicles the growing relationship of Anastasia Steele, a young college student, and Christian Grey, a 27-year-old billionaire. Anastasia grows more attracted to Christian and eventually is enlightened upon his sexual tastes, which include a number of things common in BDSM, an overlapping acronym for bondage, dominance, submission, and masochism. My overarching thoughts are that this movie is one-third hilarious, one-third extremely boring and one-third really messed up.
The hilarity comes in the form of dialogue. I’m aware that this is an adaptation of a book, and while criticisms of the source material are perfectly valid as well, there are film-exclusive problems with it. Jamie Dornan actually pulls off the character of Christian fairly well (relative to everyone else in the film), but Dakota Johnson is phenomenally awful as Anastasia. The punctuation of dialogue, such as pauses and inflections of certain words, are completely off in her scenes, and they’re very distracting. Real people do not talk like this. Characters like Anastasia are supposed to be the ones that audience members are meant to project themselves onto, but she has no character traits whatsoever even in that context.
Lots of people are calling this movie pornography and, minus the laughable acting, I don’t see it. The film is rated R, which limits how much sexual content can be shown. None of the scenes are really that explicit; and however the book portrays these acts, the movie keeps it well within the boundaries of an R rating. The worrying part of this movie and the property in general is that its portrayal of abusive relationships. Overall, it left a bad taste in my mouth and your time and money are better spent doing literally anything else.
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WOW. Did Dornan’s PR team pay you for this review? You are literally the only critic to give him a favorable review of his performance in this film. Any of the favorable reviews out there (and there aren’t many) were given for Johnson’s performance–that includes the NY Times. lol
I second that! Anyone who’s read the book would agree that Ana (Johnson) was the only character that matched the tone. The cheesiest lines came from Dornan. His acting skills were cringeworthy. The problem with the movie was not the pornography aspect, it was the BDSM. The acting made it more like an abusive/controlling situation taking over a naive and innocent girl instead of two consenting adults enjoying themselves.