Crapshoot 2016: Poisonous Chemistry

Love Hurts takes on a disturbing new reality.

Hollywood romance is ludicrously removed from human reality but that has never deterred me from believing in the beauty of true love unapologetically. My faith in the strength of the human spirit and its will to fight for a soul mate chosen by a connection beyond primal instinct makes me cringe all the more when I see something rare and requiring dedication and work reduced to something irritatingly vapid.

At this point, there’s very little more that can be said regarding “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

It’s a thinly written, laughably structured excuse for BDSM sexual encounters between two lifeless cardboard constructs that are fairly tame for anybody with a semi-healthy sex life and its status as originally being a fanfiction of another infamously terrible literary endeavor that evolved into a multi-media franchise would be an almost self explanatory origin for its awfulness were it not that fanfiction doesn’t all suck this much.

Where “Twilight” went on to become infamous for its romanticizing of dangerous, selfish, and destructive behavior as beautiful and romantically appealing however, “Fifty Shades of Grey” has a problem of having its 2 hour length padded out with nothingness.

There is definitely an air of unintentional awkwardness in watching Jamie Dornan successfully court Dakota Johnson through stalker tactics that would land anybody else with a restraining order, what may very well make it more unbearable to sit through than the phenomenon that it spawned and evolved from is the sheer amount of aimless wandering that almost everbody involved with the production seems to be caught up in.

Not that I could blame them for any of it; this is a 2 hour movie with less than 50 minutes of actual plot dragged out by characters less defined than the paintings of a Rorschach test. Protagonist and rookie journalist Ana Steele’s intense curiosity with billionaire Christian Grey and the worldly Grey’s obsession with her drives the entire film yet never seems to have an actual sensible reasoning behind it.

All of the actors make the most of the material they have while director Sam Johnson does her best to produce a well shot and solidly edited production that just can’t overcome how little material, good, bad or otherwise, there is to shoot around. The resulting sequences of field trips, conversations, and the infamously lacking sex scenes which barely feel particularly mature enough to justify the R-rating that the subject matter needed, certainly look and flow decently enough but don’t distract from the contrived and unnatural narrative that never actually settles on a point to make. It just takes itself too seriously to be a pornographic romp of sexy fun but never seems to arrive at the conclusion it desires to be a statement on BDSM culture, resulting in a half assed character study more likely to offend any of its actual participants.

This additionally creates a bizarre film representation of the uncanny valley effect that becomes almost hypnotic to view as you watch physical beings attempting to mimic human behavior and interaction similarly to alien infiltrators failing to blend in with a species they don’t understand.

Some of these backfires may make “Fifty Shades of Grey” sound worth watching as a parody of itself but it really can’t be overstated just how boring the film is to get to the point of taking any of this in.

The alternative to being bored and confused however, is unrelenting annoyance and in this case, I’m torn between whether this makes “Accidental Love” better or worse than “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

While the awkward courtship of Ana Steele and Christian Grey attempting to link practitioners of BDSM culture to suffering mental trauma is diluted by a lack of even mildly engaging content, Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, and James Marsden’s love triangle surrounding a brain damaged woman with a nail stuck in her head, kicking her libido into overdrive attempting to make a statement on the morally bankrupt implications of the American health care industries is one of the most randomly crafted comedies that I have ever seen in my life.

The lack of flow to any of the jokes along with the disconnect between its preachy agenda and nonexistent actor chemistry make the film feel like 3 different movies hacked apart and stitched together to meet the bare minimum of theatrical length. And the possibility exists that this may very well have been the case.

“Accidental Love’s” origin as “Nailed,” the rom-com so poorly handled by its executives that critical darling David O. Russel walked away from production before completion has been well documented. This beckons not the question of why it sucks but more importantly, why would the studio even bothered to shove it out over 6 years after it started filming.

Perhaps we may never truly have an answer but about the only positive thing that I can say about this film is that as grating as it gets on the nerves, it is at the very least, equally mercifully short.