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

9. It Vaguely Attempts To Analyse Its Characters To Appear Smart

So yeah, about half-an-hour in, the film dispenses all the silly phallic imagery and obvious allusions ("ho ho, what's he using cable ties for") and instead steers into more serious territory. Or at least what it thinks constitutes serious territory; in reality it ends up flip-flopping back and forth between lazy character study and softcore porno. The latter is inevitable in a movie like this, but the former is at first promising - attempting to dissect the world of BDSM offers the promise of something intelligent amongst the smut. Predictably though, the film bungles it. In fetish circles both the book and film are criticised for their complete misunderstanding of the culture and coming out of the film it's hard to feel you've actually learned anything about a subject society either plays for comedy or treats in hushed tones. Even taking things on a more simple, character-based level there's a total misunderstanding of conventional human interaction. The film tries to present a nuanced history for Christian Grey€™s dominant tendencies, but winds up painting him just as a damaged sex pest with serious abandonment issues. Anastasia Steele's arc isn't much better. She repeatedly jumps back and forth between timid student and confident combatant simply whenever the plot needs her to, no character coming through all the lip-biting. This wouldn't be such an egregious crime if the entire middle act hadn't put so much time into treating itself as making some profound point, creating the illusion it's being insightful.