My inner goddess packed up and left me to it about 10 minutes after the opening credits of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, roughly around the time that Anastasia and Christian first locked eyes and he gazed into hers and uttered those most romantic of words: "cable ties".
Judging by the reaction of the roughly 98.5-per-cent-female audience – I counted three men, one of whom waited until long after the closing credits to slink out – mine wasn’t the only inner goddess who failed to stick around for the party.
Which was a shame, because the atmosphere before the lights went down was very much a party. This was the film’s opening night, and the punters had booked their tickets and come along in gangs of three or more.
It was apparent even from the trailers – during which a castration joke and excerpts from a stripper movie had them rolling in the aisles – that this was not going to be a particularly tough audience.
As the film progressed there were more moments of unintentional hilarity, and moments of vague titillation, but overall the mood in the cinema seemed to be one of confusion. Were we supposed to laugh at this bit? Was this meant to be a steamy bit? As Louise, who hadn’t read the books but came along out of curiosity, put it, “I didn’t understand any of the characters or relationships. Where was the plot? Was it a comedy? But abuse isn’t funny. Was that the point?”
Abuse is not too strong a word for the way that Christian Grey (played by Jamie Dornan) gradually erodes the boundaries of what Anastasia Steele (played by Dakota Johnson) considers acceptable physical force while he goes about instructing her on what to wear, what to eat, even which doctor to see.
He stalks her across the country, breaking into her apartment when she is not there, selling her car without her permission and turning up announced at a hotel where she is staying with her mother.
Eventually he beats her so brutally with a belt (albeit with her consent) that she is left sobbing in a ball on the bed.
“It would have been nice to see a film about empowering female sexuality without a woman actually being beaten in it,” said Sarah, who hadn’t read the books either. “That said, I kind of enjoyed it on a level of hilarity.”
But even if you were able to leave its troubling message aside, and try to appreciate it as a piece of escapist fantasy, the film – unlike Christian’s self-piloted helicopter – never really takes flight.
Part of the problem is Dornan. In this film he has all the sex appeal of a Ken doll and the charisma of one of his beloved cable ties. He doesn’t really smoulder so much as smirk in an unnerving and perpetually self-satisfied fashion. But it’s not entirely his fault: he’s competing with the imaginations of EL James’s 40 million readers.
In the books Christian Grey was a blank canvas, allowing readers to project their own fantasies on to him. “I thought he’d be older. He should be in his 40s,” said Eileen, who had read all three books and viewed the film in the much the same light – “harmless fun between two consenting adults”.
In fact EL James has him as 27, but really the appeal of Christian Grey was that he could be whoever you wanted him to be. Jamie Dornan looks like a guy trying to sell you a mobile phone.
Dakota Johnson, whose nipples feature so frequently that they deserve their own credit, does her best with the less than inspiring material, pitching Anastasia somewhere between Bridget Jones and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
The effect is occasionally, maybe even intentionally, comedic. In one scene she wakes up in Christian’s Grey’s bed, having vomited tequila shots all over his designer loafers the night before. He returns from a run, sexily tousled, and leans in for a kiss. “Brush your teeth,” someone sitting behind me hissed. Likewise, the first sex scene elicited peals of laughter, which might not have been quite the effect that the film’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, was after.
And then there’s the dialogue. Mercifully, the inner goddesses and the “holy cows” didn’t make it into the final cut, but that’s about the best thing you can say about the script, which has Grey delivering such lines as “I enjoy various physical pursuits” in a way that is about as sexy as a Linguaphone tape.
After they've had their first coffee together Grey rescues Anastasia from a passing bicycle, then looks into her eyes and murmurs solemnly, "I have to let you go," to more loud titters from the audience. Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans he is not.
“The dialogue was painfully overdelivered. I read the books and enjoyed them, but the film was completely disappointing,” said Catherine.
At heart, though, this is a love story – and the real love affair in the movie is the one between Grey and his credit card. In the book the helicopters and the iPads are a bit of foreplay; in the film they’re the main event. Here’s Christian lovingly fingering his squillion-dollar silk tie. Here’s Christian looking manly in his souped-up helicopter. Here’s Christian playing his Fazioli piano topless in his Dad jeans – oh, you get the picture.
On the opening night the audience gamely hung on until the closing scene, which was so odd and deeply unsatisfying that the closing credits were met with howls of protest.
So, yes, it's a terrible movie. The script is appalling, the acting is dire and the message is, to say the least, troubling. But much of that was true of Dirty Dancing and Top Gun, and millions of us still took – and take – guilty pleasure in them. In many ways Fifty Shades is their natural successor. It will probably be a huge hit.
