Limp 'Fifty Shades of Grey' hits the screen

There are important things missing from the movie version of "Fifty Shades of Grey."

One, and this is the good news, is almost all of the words from the E.L. James book.

The daffy Fan Gal prose is gone and so is most of the leaden dialogue used to depict the now infamous relationship between innocent college lass Anastasia Steele and powerful businessman Christian Grey, who introduces her to kinky sex.

The unintentionally funny stuff has been replaced with intentionally funny stuff - winking references to the book that also work to make the characters somewhat more plausible.

There is even a brave attempt to take James' worst offense - cultured, Chopin-playing Christian says goodbye with the words "laters, babe" - by assigning them to someone else and having Christian use them ironically.

Nice try, screenwriter Kelly Marcel, but there's just no redeeming that phrase.

And poor Christian has problems already. On screen, he's not even a character. He's a figure in a glossy magazine ad for Hugo Boss suits, leaning on a sports car, a helicopter, a grand piano.

Fans of the book will look at this dreary fellow and wonder: what's missing?

Well, the movie has to be circumcised - I mean, circumspect - about certain things in order to achieve an R rating. Shades, at bottom, is an X-rated book of graphic sexual encounters. And let's just say that with the movie Christian, you don't get the whole package.

When he lures Ana into the Red Room of Pain, he's wearing jeans - Abercrombie & Fitch style - or wrapped in a towel, or standing like Austin Powers in front of a strategic bedpost.

He's been movie-neutered, turned into a Ken doll, which makes Ana BDSM Barbie, and the movie's carnal content blandly soft-core - the usual slo-mo writhing, with vaguely naughty pop tunes playing in the background. The sort of scene that "MacGruber" tried to destroy with satire five years ago.

This is a shame, because Johnson is really pretty good in this role and single-handedly makes "Shades" watchable for about an hour.

She has a voice that's appropriately soft but never weak, and she locates in Ana the right mixture of curiosity, fear and arousal.

And agency.

The movie is better than the book at dramatizing the gamesmanship between the two leads - the literal negotiation of boundaries, the more complex psychological negotiation - and Johnson is able to show Ana as a stronger character than the woman we meet in the book.

But her gains come at the expense of a flattened-out Christian, whose needs stem from trauma and who thus ends up being a weirdo taking out his problems on women with a belt.

In the closing moments, "Shades" goes from being dull to disturbing, but only slightly. Usually, for a woman to get this far in a Hollywood relationship movie, she has to sleep with Seth Rogen.

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