Christian Grey May be the Most Unlikeable Protagonist in Movie History

Which is really saying something considering Travis Bickle and Aileen Warnos were technically protagonists.

The Fifty Shades mega-gazillionaire is every bit as psychopathic as those two but he’s even worse because a whole generation of bored haus fraus somehow find this creep attractive.

First of all, Christian Grey is not attractive. The actor who plays him may be handsome, but the character is worse than evil. He’s ridiculous. Here, in no particular order, are the problems I have with Christian Grey.

He’s a rich, spoiled sociopath. He’s Patrick Bateman from American Psycho except a lot duller. You know in ‘80’s movies where the hot girl has a guy that she just thinks of as a friend? And her boyfriend is usually a rich, smug jerk who treats her like crap and it’s the protagonists job to take her away from her insufferable ass-spasm of a beau? Christian Grey is the bad boyfriend from an ‘80’s movie!! He’s worse, come to think of it. Most bad ‘80’s boyfriends are just jerks who don’t appreciate her the way she deserves. Not that many of them actively seek to commit acts of domestic violence on her.

If he only made thirty thousand a year and worked as a truck driver this would be an entirely different kind of movie. One that would require police dogs to search and abandoned barn, probably.

Here’s a movie trope that has to go: “Oh, you’re an English Lit major? Let me quote some Thomas Hardy for you off the top of my head after just discovering this fact about you!” Nobody does this. I was an English Lit major but it’s not like I have a lengthy set of quotes handy from every writer that I can just pop off to impress a girl. This move doesn’t show that you’re intelligent, it shows that you’re most likely an autistic savant.

He stalks her. Her workplace, a bar she’s at with friends…GEORGIA. I especially love the part where he almost punches out her male friend who is asking, respectfully, for a kiss…then takes her back to his hotel and puts her in his bed while she’s too intoxicated to give her consent. “How dare you try to kiss this girl you admire and know well!! I’m just about to manipulate her into letting me use her like a latex sex doll that I really despise.”

It goes from stalking to manipulation. This crap-stain does everything in The Abusers Handbook. He isolates her from friends and family. He controls her schedule.

He emotionally abuses her throughout the movie. He does everything he can to make her dependant on him. He treats her wishes as unimportant. Seriously, this guy deserves a punch in his smug, rich face.

What was that scene after her first time in the dungeon room where he’s carrying her like a fireman carrying a child in a blanket from the scene of a house fire??? Was anybody else unsettled by that?

He spanks her harder than Adrian Peterson spanks his kids and AP may go to jail.

The movie is never sexy, not even for a moment. I think it’s mostly because of him. He’s charmless and boring. What’s supposed to come across as “brooding” and “intense” is actually “douchey” and “laughable”. He says, “I’ve work to attend to” and “There are urgent matters that require my attention”. Nobody really talks like that except assholes that want people to think they’re more important than they actually are.

“My tastes are…singular.” ---look up “singular” , genius. It means “one of a kind” and since they mass-produce all this bondage stuff I think the word you were looking for was “kinky, but not all that uncommon.”