A student (Dakota Johnson) falls for a wealthy businessman (Jamie Dornan) with a fetish for spanking women with unflattering fringes.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 2015 adaptation of E. L. James’ bestseller is a struggle before the bondage even starts. It opens with Anastasia Steele (a name as robotic as Johnson’s performance) going to interview Christian Grey (a name as exciting as Dornan’s performance) and asks him, “Are you gay?” because it’s written in her list of questions and apparently she is incapable of reading something without saying it out loud. Fortunately for Ana, Christian is neither gay nor picky, and sees her intellectual deficiency as easy prey.

If that weird predator fantasy sounds familiar, 50 Shades of Grey started life as Twilight fan fiction and is essentially the same story with fewer vampires and more paperwork. Christian initially makes Ana sign an NDA so she won’t tell the press about his sexual proclivities, even though these turn out to be so tame that even the Daily Mail would tell her it wasn’t worth printing. He then presents her with a contract codifying their dominant/submissive relationship, which Ana spends longer deliberating than Johnson did her Madame Web contract. Although in fairness to Ana it would take ages to read the whole thing aloud.

At first you feel sorry for Ana for being manipulated by this rich older creep who exploits her ignorance of relationships to control her. But as the story wears on, your sympathies actually switch to Christian, whose forthrightness about what he wants (he literally wrote a contract) is met by flip-flopping and kink-shaming by Ana. Fair enough if she isn’t into it, but she ends up punishing him by refusing to accept their sexual incompatibility (and I’m not just talking about the actors’ lack of chemistry).

The entire argument is rendered absurd by the realisation that Christian’s sexual appetites are actually 50 shades of vanilla. All his desires could easily be achieved on a normal bed, but he is so intent on using his “playroom” that you wonder if he has to use it in order to claim it as a tax write-off. In any case, Ana is subject to significantly less punishment than the audience, who have to sit through endless email exchanges (phwoar) and pop songs saying what is happening in the scene in case it wasn’t apparent from the characters constantly explaining everything.

Unsurprisingly for a film whose model relationship is Edward and Bella, 50 Shades is more toxic than a Blake Lively interview. It considers a man telling a woman off for drinking the height of romance, getting tickled with a peacock feather the ultimate taboo, and that being into S&M must be the result of some past abuse, as Christian reveals he was seduced by one of his mother’s friends at the age of 15. Now why does Sam Taylor-Johnson’s name sound familiar?