BDSM a bit of a bore in flat 'Fifty Shades of Grey'

City Paper grade: C

Let's hope the marketing prodigy who suggested Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson fake like they hate each other in interviews gets a big fat raise. He/she has hedged all bets on Fifty Shades of Grey's inevitable box-office triumph — anyone outside E.L. James' undersexed rank and file is buying a ticket in the hopes of taking in a trainwreck. Though Sam Taylor-Johnson can barely be blamed, both audiences will walk out disappointed in her capably made but supremely corny adaptation of the McBondage phenomenon. It's not risky or titillating, and it's not nearly as bad as you want it to be.

Dornan, so damn good as a complex killer of women in the BBC series The Fall (Netflix that), plays a power-washed half-version of that character here. His Christian Grey, through the virtues of immaculate tailoring alone, has amassed a looming empire in the Pacific Northwest. After taking a shine to Johnson's bookish Anastasia, he drafts a dominant-submissive contract he hopes that she will sign, a interminable process that calls for filler in Costco-caliber portions. He plays sad songs on a beautiful piano. She Googles pics of tied-up women, then shuts her laptop in embarrassment. He pours dozens of glasses of white wine and pulls his T-shirts off using a bizarre technique no human has ever used to remove a T-shirt. She makes pancakes. Not to be coarse but sometimes it's like yo when are we going to fuck?

When the negotiations finally are interrupted by sex, sometimes it's sweet, sometimes it's rough, but all times it's bland. It's not fair to claim Dornan and Johnson lack "chemistry," since they really seem to be doing the best they can. It's that James' preposterous trash-lit juggernaut, just like the sparkly vampire franchise that inspired it, deals in cheap, dumb thrills that only resonate with the most impressionable.