Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ on Netflix, the Quasi-Naughty Sex-Dungeon Romance Starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan

We’ve reached the 9.3rd anniversary of Fifty Shades of Grey, an event of such significance to warrant lodging it in the Netflix Top 10 for a while – there’s surely no higher honor for this thing. The infamous Fifty Shades pop-cultural saga began with the 2011 publication of E.L. James’ novel of the same title, which began as Twilight fan fiction and eventually became the naughtiest must-read for bored suburbanites harboring FORBIDDEN S&M yearnings – yearnings rendered in such atrocious prose, it had to be intentional. HAD to be. The book’s success inspired two sequels and therefore three movie adaptations starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, playing Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, two characters almost recognizable as human beings whose romantic relationship made no sense whatsoever but some nevertheless found tantalizing – ironically or otherwise – because their bedroom activities occasionally featured ballgags and butt plugs. Here I pause to note how Time once crowned James one of the 100 most influential people of 2012, and notable critics called the Fifty Shades phenomenon a “society-shifting cultural event.” I don’t bring this up to mock these assertions as ridiculous, but rather, to point out how they were actually sort of true, as life on Earth was considerably better before Fifty Shades existed. It sure doesn’t seem like coincidence.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The setting: another planet, possibly a wholly different reality. We see establishing shots of clouds, which are literal shades of gray, while ‘I Put a Spell on You’ plays on the soundtrack. Anastasia Steele (Johnson), college student, mousy bookworm and unofficial Frumpmaster General, pulls on a thrift-store cardigan and pulls her hair back into a sloppy ponytail and heads out to interview Christian Grey (Dornan) for the school paper. Why? He’s a billionaire and Very Important Business Guy who’s going to speak at her graduation ceremony. She pulls up to the massively erect skyscraper dubbed GREY HOUSE in downtown Seattle and parks right in front of the building, which is the first of many highly implausible things to happen in this plot. Whatever happens in Grey House is a mystery – telecom something something, I think, but it mostly involves tall supermodel women in monochrome fashion walking around, ushering people in and out of Christian’s office. Which is to say, Anastasia is way out of place here, especially after she trips and falls flat on her face two seconds before she meets the guy. I think this is supposed to be high-larious, but it also functions to put her on all fours before the two of them even consider doing anything kinky.

From all sensible viewpoints, the interview goes over like E. coli at a hot dog-eating contest, but when you’re talking about Fifty Shades, the word “sensible” gets flushed down the loo. Christian recites line after highly loaded line (e.g., “I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele”) and Anastasia bites her lower lip and nervously fiddles with a pencil and asks stupid questions and generally acts like a movie character who drives an old VW Beetle that goes pluppita pluppita pluppita, because that’s exactly what she does and who she is. One thing’s for sure, Christian is the hawtest 27-year-old billionaire boy in the history of everything, and just as Anastasia leaves GREY HOUSE a rainstorm erupts just in time to cool her the hell off. Phew. Glad that awkwardness is over. There’s your movie. The end!

No! I’m just joshin’ ya! Actually, Anastasia goes back to her Regular Life Of Reading Books And Working At A Mom And Pop Hardware Store, except one day, she’s restocking SCREWS in the SCREW aisle when Christian walks in and asks for cable ties, masking tape and rope, but not riding crops, because I think you can only get those at the Farm and Fleet. This, my friends, is the beginning of a bee-yoo-tiful friendship in which Christian will be a creepy stalker who treats her like a possession and tries to control her and wants her to sign an NDA-slash-consent-form so he can tie her up and spank her and things like that – but hey, he has nice muscles and he puts her in his helicopter and buckles her in nice and tight and grabs the stick and they flyyyyyyyyy over Seattle, which is pretty wild and amazing, and apparently distracts her from the creepy shit. He is Mr. Mixed Messages, and she is Miss Colorblind To Red Flags. But hey, I bet she can change him, right? Hope springs!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A lot of bad ones, none of which are as bad as this one. It wants to be SCANDALOUS like 9 ½ Weeks but it’s too inept. Serious people will watch Secretary and move on.

Performance Worth Watching: As with Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, we have since reclaimed Johnson and Dornan from the Fifty Shades milieu. For Ms. Dakota: Suspiria whiplashed her out of Ana Steele mode right quick; she was flat-out great in supporting roles in A Bigger Splash and the terribly underrated The Lost Daughter; she made nice-but-no-more-than-that stuff like The Peanut Butter Falcon, Our Friend, The High Note and Cha Cha Real Smooth more memorable thanks to her endearing performances; and she even made the ungodly Madame Web almost choke-downable with her highly amusing, self-aware promotional appearances. And Dornan: He found his groove after a while, showing comedy chops in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar; he was the best thing in the excellent Belfast; and he’s won over critics and viewers with BBC/Netflix series The Tourist.

Memorable Dialogue: A handful of doozies for ya:

“I enjoy various physical pursuits.” – Christian

“Necrophilia’s not my thing.” – Christian

“I don’t make love. I f—. HARD.” – Christian

“What are butt plugs?” – Anastasia

Sex and Skin: None. Kidding! There are 4.4 sex scenes that are the reason this movie exists, and they feature butts, pubes, boobs, thrusting, straddling, tying-up and scads of frank talk about where this thing goes and what that thing does, but not a single glimpse of Christian’s sausage.

Our Take: Anyone else notice that being a submissive actually makes Anastasia more assertive? Loll THAT irony around on your tongue like an ice cube you’ll eventually plop in your sex-partner’s belly button! I’m not convinced this is intentional; Fifty Shades of Grey is too slopped together to have any overarching goal beyond faux-provocation, which ranges from overwrought visual double-entendres to sex scenes that are supposed to be torrid but are actually quite tame, silly and laughable. We can criticize the movie for its lack of consistent characters and dramatic stakes, for its haphazard narrative structure, for its style-over-substance M.O. (and that style is, in a word, chintzy, like KMart trying to be Saks Fifth Avenue). We can also argue that it’s intentionally bad, but that hair can be easily split – just because the movie reaches its intended goal of being a campy, guilt-ridden nonpleasure that should only be watched while drunk and/or high doesn’t mean it’s any good.

But I’m torn. I saw Fifty Shades nine years ago and concluded that it’s funny purely by accident, the kind of stuff that we laugh at derisively. Now, after revisiting it, I’m convinced it’s legitimately trying to be shitty: We’ve since learned that Johnson, who was a relative Hollywood newcomer at the time and therefore a bit of a question mark, is too smart and self-aware to not be delivering lines like what are butt plugs without a knowing wink (you could say similar things about the similarly bewildering Madame Web), especially during the movie’s “best” scene – read: the one that inspires real laughs instead of just snorts and hoots – in which Anastasia and Grey debate the contents of his S&M consent contract. And Dornan’s performance is so detached and perplexing, it feels like he’s being unconvincing on purpose. Their paths through such tortured and nonsensical material are forged from the ores of pure survival. 

Reclamation is part-and-parcel to the current pop-cultural zeitgeist – inevitably, someone will cough up a look-at-me contrarian Fifty Shades-is-actually-good take, proffering excuses for its more troublesome components (“Christian Grey is an entertaining character because he’s so toxic!”), and, regardless of intent, it’ll feel like a bad-faith argument. (It’s probably already happened, and if so, I’m glad I missed it.) The movie doesn’t hold up under scrutiny in any context, and I’ll die on that hill, biting and scratching and whipping and spanking if need be – but no fisting. Promise.

Our Call: The heat death of the universe has never felt closer. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.