50 Shades: Whipped into shape

Except for the new instalment of Star Wars, there's no more steamily anticipated film this year than Fifty Shades of Grey. Advance ticket sales, boosted by its Valentine's Day release, have been record-breaking.

The challenge for Sam Taylor-Johnson, the Turner Prize-nominated fine art photographer, was to please the books' legion of (predominantly female) fans without allowing the film to become a soft-pornographic laughing stock.

Dakota Johnson, daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, has screenwriter Kelly Marcel to thank that the film adaptation eliminates all bubblehead stream of consciousness from the book, allowing the camera instead to occupy Anastasia's point of view. It's usually a view of Jamie Dornan, the Northern Irish actor best-known for playing a serial killer in BBC Two's The Fall. He was a late replacement as Christian Grey after Charlie Hunnam got cold feet.

Taylor-Johnson has openly talked about her on-set battle with novelist EL James to defend every decision even minutely diverging from the book. So how has it all worked out? Almost shockingly well, considering.

The lead performances and sleek style choices sell it almost irresistibly to the target audience, but the film has the confidence to end bruisingly unresolved, with the structural equivalent of a slap in the face.

Meanwhile, for anyone who struggled to wade through the gruelling mire of James's verbiage, it's a form of revenge to watch the filmmaking slice through it, cleanly stripping off the fat. Great art it's not - but it's frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game as we could realistically have expected.

The film's single biggest asset is Johnson, who has worked hard with Marcel and Taylor-Johnson to perform a three-woman salvage job on the character of Ana.

There's more fight in this Ana than you're expecting.

Dornan, with his tousled hair and chunky build, is a precise physical match for this ludicrous fantasy-hottie-Bluebeard role, and somehow manages to render it only intermittently absurd. A good kind of absurd.

The film doesn't ever get totally under his skin and doesn't want to - it needs to recoil, with a shiver of uncertainty, as we get to grips with his predilections.

The sex scenes clamber up the scale in intensity, without ever really threatening to get white-hot, and feature a lot more of Johnson than they do of Dornan. You could say she's submissive to the point of baring all, from most angles, whereas he's dominant enough to keep the camera from straying down where he doesn't want it. Even when Grey, with his riding crops and cat-o'-nine-tails and Red Room of Pain, would claim otherwise, these sequences stay well within the bounds of vanilla mainstream taste.

And they offer an easy answer to the following question. Would you rather read an assortment of appallingly organised words describing two stick-thin characters yelping on the page, or watch two very attractive young stars going at it, in images filmed by Seamus McGarvey? This great cinematographer - The Hours, We Need to Talk About Kevin and Godzilla - is a ready-made cornerstone for the indisputable argument that Fifty Shades is a far better film than it was a book.

If Taylor-Johnson and James tussled for control, it's a relief and even a bit of a thrill that the director came out on top.

What others say

Before the pervery commences, our hero lowers his undergarments and in a more conventional sense does to the female lead what Ms James did to the book trade and what Sam Taylor-Johnson does to your chances of seeing a penis.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Not campy or clumsy enough to be so-bad-it's-good, not quite stylish or sizzling or steamy enough to overcome its atrocious source material.

Josh Dickey, Mashable

It's a slow build to the smutty bits, and one that's disappointingly devoid of tension.

Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

• The film opens in cinemas today