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I struggled with whether to write this. It seems like a foregone conclusion at this point that “Fifty Shades of Grey” will be a massive hit at the box office. There’s probably nothing anyone can say to change that; the hand wringing only serves to promote the film even more.

The thing exists, after all, purely to make money and engender controversy because it’s making money and then make more money off of the controversy it engendered. It has us cornered. If we complain about it, we’re doing exactly what they want us to do.

It’s not like anyone involved in producing this smoldering pile of cinematic sewage would necessarily disagree with the criticisms anyway. They know what they’ve done. It’s not as though they thought the story was remotely compelling or substantive. It wasn’t like when Francis Ford Copolla first read “The Godfather” and knew it was an epic tale destined to become one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time.

I imagine whoever first cooked up the idea to make a “Fifty Shades” movie probably didn’t even read it. They kind of got the gist and thought, “eh, it’s garbage but it’ll probably make a billion dollars because we can vomit just about anything into the trough and Americans will come in droves to devour it.”

So before we even get to the content itself — rancid as it is — we already know that the film is cynical and worthless, and, as I’ve previously discussed, born purely out of a desire to bilk sexually frustrated suburban soccer moms out of their disposable income. It has no other purpose. It serves no other function. It is an empty vessel (well, a vessel filled with leather whips and ball gags, but empty besides that). It’s not art, and anyone who pays to see it is degrading themselves — and I’m not even talking about the bondage and the glamorized rape yet. (Read more about the review of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ HERE)