The best worst Fifty Shades of Grey reviews

As you may have noticed, the Fifty Shades of Grey film is out. The first reviews are in, and the majority are less than positive. Here's a round-up of the most excoriating verdicts.

The New Yorker

There you have the problem with this film. It is gray with good taste—shade upon shade of muted naughtiness, daubed within the limits of the R rating. Think of it as the “Downton Abbey” of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination. You get dirtier talk in most action movies, and more genitalia in a TED talk on Renaissance sculpture.

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New Statesman

Ironically, the most consensual activity that takes place in the film is the sex.

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The Times: Hilarious, ludicrous and dubious

Think World of Interiors meets The Little Book of Bondage, and you may get the picture, which starts out hilarious, becomes ludicrous and finally dubious.

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Variety: Punishing, literally

The final half-hour or so is punishing in more than just a literal sense, bringing us to a less-than-scintillating cliffhanger in the now de rigueur manner of book-based, fan-driven franchise fare.

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The Guardian: Inspired by Victoria Wood?

30 minutes into Fifty Shades of Grey I realised what the real inspiration for the film is: Victoria Wood’s famously dark and disturbing song about the transgressive ecstasy of turning off Gardener’s Question Time in expectation of being bent over your hostess trolley, and beaten on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly.

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The New York Times: Dornan is like Lego

Mr Dornan, given the job of inspiring lust, fascination and also maybe a tiny, thrilling frisson of fear, succeeds mainly in eliciting pity... Mr Dornan has the bland affect of a model, by which I mean a figure made of balsa wood or Lego.

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Rolling Stone: Punishingly dull

About as erotic as an ad for Pottery Barn... A few early reviews have given the film a pass because it's not as dirty as advertised. They seem grateful. I'm disappointed. Twisted me! The true audiences for Fifty Shades of Grey are gluttons for punishment — by boredom.

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The Independent: The skyscraper is the most erotic part

We witness English lit student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) arrive at the offices of billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and look skyward up at the long protruding lines of a tall skyscraper. It’s the closest thing to arousal in the film as the movie keeps within the confines of film classification boards by refusing to show genitalia and concentrating its gaze mainly on the female rather than male form.

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Newsday: How can a film about sex be this dull?

You might be equally agog at how an R-rated film full of kinky sex and dirty talk could be so painfully dull.

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USA Today: Zero chemistry

Sitting through the turgid and tedious S&M melodrama that is Fifty Shades of Grey may feel like its own form of torture... Perhaps worst of all, chemistry is nil between Jamie Dornan as billionaire Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson as curious college student Anastasia Steele.

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Entertainment Weekly: Needs more sex

Nobody sweats, nobody strains, nobody loses control or even fakes losing control by simulating an orgasm.

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Mashable: Needs more sex

There's not nearly enough sex in it.... Neither terrible, nor all that sexy-hot. Kind of watchable and tame, really.

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Finally, a more positive verdict from The Telegraph

It proves that age-old saw that great books rarely make great films, whereas barely-literate junk can turn into something ripe and even electric on screen.

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More: 12 of the most excoriating reviews ever writtenMore: Another reason to boycott Fifty Shades of Grey