Blue Steele
Not tonight, we’ve got a headache... FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: UNSEEN EDITION OUT 22 JUNE One-disc DVD, two-disc DVD, BD
You’ve read E.L. James’ Etch-A-Sketched sex books (100 million copies sold). You’ve bought the gaffer tape (B&Q sent a joke memo warning of increased demand when the movie hit cinemas). Now you can watch Sam Taylor-Johnson’s box-office smash in the (dis) comfort of your very own red room. If you don’t know the story, it’s the classic Cinderella tale of virginal student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) finally getting to go to the balls – belonging, in this case, to tumescent Filofax Christian Grey ( Jamie Dornan). Call it The Devil Wears Nada and you’re nearly there.
Dreamy of face but deviant of trouser, Grey is a 15 year old’s conception of a brooding antihero. Though he holds Anastasia’s hair while she pukes, sends her Thomas Hardy novels and squires her off to shagland in his helicopter, he’s actually a stalky sex reptile. “I don’t make love, I fuck – hard!” he tells her, without laughing. Indeed, Dornan and particularly Johnson deserve credit for keeping straight faces, especially in the Razzie-tastic hardware store scene, which nods to Dornan’s breakthrough role on TV’s The Fall when Anastasia tells Grey, “You’re the complete serial killer”, and he replies, “Not today.”
The main problem is not that Fifty Shades is bad – it’s slickly made, and the Blu-ray package contains more extras (featurettes, interviews, the three minutes longer “unseen edition”) than a billionaire’s BDSM contract – but that it’s not quite bad enough. A bit more self-awareness, and the soulless Mills & Boobs shenanigans would have been comedy gold.