Author E.L. James and director Sam Taylor-Johnson desperately want you to see this as a boy-meets-girl story, but that’s an impossibility because the leaps in logic are too grand and the core story is rotten. Christian Grey’s pursuit of Anastasia Steele is two-thirds of the film, but about halfway through you realize that with each setpiece, we learn nothing more about these characters that wasn’t outlined in their first meeting – a classic cinematic mistake of valuing the destination over the road that gets you there. Obviously though, the people associated with this project try hard to make this picture something other than a mess – the actual look of the film is stunningly competent and Dakota Johnson brings a playfulness that is woefully absent from the rest of the proceedings – but this was always going to be a wreck because the source material is juvenile and poorly structured. There should be a special circle of hell devoted to Jaime Dornan’s performance – an all-time horrific display of acting, though admittedly he wasn’t given much to work with. For the uninitiated, stay far away from this picture, and for those who found James’ novels both titillating and entertaining, you have my sympathy.