Fifty Shades Of Grey: 10 Ways It Tricks People Into Liking It

10. It Pretends To Be So-Bad-Its-Good (For The First Twenty Minutes)

The Internet has provided an ever-growing resurgence for so-bad-its-good movies. In the pre-web days you had to make do with Rocky Horror, or whatever VHS a friend-of-a-friend had dug up, but now the likes of The Room or Birdemic can ascend to almost mythical status and films initially complete failures in their own genres can be repurposed as comedies (see The Wicker Man). Fifty Shades Of Grey is aware it faces a major uphill struggle with a good chunk of the audience, so invests the first twenty minutes into painting itself as one of those laughably bad movies. The already ham-fisted script and chemistry-lacking leads are aided by some simplistic phallic imagery and lingering shots after particularly bad lines to get the whole audience chuckling along. It reaches its ridiculous zenith when Christian Grey lunges forward to seductively eat some toast, providing one of the most ridiculous cinematic moment in recent memory and proving once and for all that grilled bread will never be sexy. But then, shortly after that toast moment in fact, something strange happens. This tact stops and things become incredibly self-serious (and, as a by-product, head-bangingly dull). The film throws in just enough self-aware awkwardness to get people tweeting that it's a "must see crap-fest" before delivering what it actually cares about.