860. Fifty Shades Of Grey (2015)

Starring: Jamie Dornan, Dakota Johnson, Jennifer Ehle

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson

Running Time: 125 mins

Fifty Shades Of Grey is an American film, based on the hit book of the same name, about a young woman whose life changes completely after she falls in love with a handsome but disturbed billionaire.

Well, this was one of the dullest films I’ve ever seen, however it’s not all the fault of the filmmakers, in fact you can see a lot of effort gone into making this story intriguing, evidenced by great directing, relatively decent acting, and a good soundtrack. Instead, the source material for this story must be so unbelievably dull and cheesy that it was surely almost impossible for this to ever be made into a semi-decent film.

Let’s start on that note. Obviously, I haven’t read the book, but from what I’ve been told and have found out, it’s a dire, poorly-written and simply uninteresting story adapted from one woman’s own Twilight fan fiction, and I can make out from that that the reason this film is so unbearably boring is because of the original story.

Basically, nothing in the plot actually makes any sense. The main female character, Anastasia Steele is painfully dull and plain; you don’t know why she actually falls in love with this seemingly stalkerish guy at any point, whilst her character development, which all comes in the last ten minutes of the film, is not at all interesting or convincing.

Meanwhile, the billionaire, Christian Grey, is beyond tedious. Initially, he’s meant to have an air of mystery about him, but that doesn’t work because he just seems so wooden, and then when he reveals everything about his creepy fetishes and dark past, there’s very little to care about because he’s such an unbelievable and one-dimensional character.

The way that the plot unfolds throughout this film is the worst thing by a mile. There was never one second in this film where I was interested in any of the characters or what was happening, because it’s all done in such jerky stages that there’s no swift development of the plot, they just fall in love (inexplicably), then it gets a bit weird, and then it ends: there’s very little to really get intrigued about because this story is so shallow and ultimately incredibly predictable.

The first forty minutes of this film are painful enough, but at least they’re just totally dull, there’s nothing malicious about them, whereas the remainder of the film, when the relationship turns nasty, is horrible to watch, as well as still being completely uninteresting, and that’s what really ruined my opinion of this film: it could have just been dull, but then it had to get mean-spirited.

On the positive side, you can see that the film makers tried to do everything possible to make this terrible story slightly interesting. I think they could have done a much better job on the screenplay, because the dialogue here is unbearable, however Sam Taylor-Johnson’s slick directing, as well as decent performances from Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, were signs of life in this otherwise horrifically tedious and mean-spirited film, so that’s why it gets a 2.5 from me.