Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY  (2015)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Taylor-Johnson
    Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Jennifer Ehle,
    Victor Rasuk, Eloise Mumford, Marcia Gay Harden
With graduation fast approaching, a sweet young college student hooks up with a dour but handsome millionaire who introduces her to his world of cold, gleaming affluence and a wide selection of ropes, cuffs, floggers and riding crops. This is based on a popular erotic novel, and it's another one of those movies where you slog your way through much of its running time waiting to get to the naughty bits. The story has possibilities in the shifting negotiation between a dominant and a submissive over the conditions and rules of the game. The problem is that you never learn enough about these characters for either of them to establish a convincing human identity. The woman at least shows signs of potential, even if some of her choices don't make much sense. The millionaire's just a stick, a charmless control freak with no personality at all. So he's got issues and secrets and a past. Who cares? He's a fucking bore. And speaking of fucking, another problem with "Shades of Grey" is that the sex scenes aren't explicit enough. It's not that you can't figure out what's going on in them. It's that they're what the movie's about, the reason it exists. I can see where caving to the restrictive demands of an R rating might make sense commercially, but this is a piece that pretty much demands an NC-17, or maybe just no rating at all. That wouldn't make it a better movie necessarily. But at least it'd be a more honest one.