She gets fewer opportunities to flex that muscle in the latest installment, since its makers have somehow convinced themselves that there’s not only a story we care about, but an arc to be followed. But Dakota Johnson is fun to watch in them. The Fifty Shades movies aren’t fun, even during the rich-ladies-slapping-one-another climax of the second (and goofiest) picture, Fifty Shades Darker. So she approaches her scenes alternating wide-eyed wonder and knowing wit, lending a merriment to her work that lifts a hundred-pound weight off the rest of this dour franchise. No, what she does in these films is more complicated: Clearly, early on, she decided that director Sam Taylor-Johnson (and, later, James Foley) could make whatever silly-ass erotic thriller they were making, but she was starring in a light comedy about a naïve young woman who meets a real piece of work. She doesn’t wink at us, because that’s not what a professional does she doesn’t project condescension toward the material either, though you couldn’t blame her if she did. For a brand built on kink, these movies are astonishingly vanilla.) (The much-ballyhooed sex is notable mostly for its dullness these films are filled with ornate, theatrical lead-ups to the tamest of light-bondage foreplay, which give way to the blandest missionary-position sex imaginable. Each VH1 jukebox needle-drop is clumsily timed to inform its audience that it’s time for another breakup, sex scene, or montage of riding in a fancy jet or fast car.
(Jamie Dornan certainly does.) They’re embarrassing tripe, poorly written, sloppily assembled, and sound-tracked within an inch of their lives. She’s then soldiered on to the next one, baring her body, soul, and comic chops-the very definition of an actor doing more than anyone expects, whether it matters or not.Īnd make no mistake, she could sleepwalk through these movies. She’s then followed each of those shoots with a pained press tour of paired interviews with her co-star, in which it’s abundantly clear that their minimal onscreen chemistry is straight-up Hepburn-and-Tracy compared to their off-screen camaraderie.
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