Fifty Shades of Grey is brilliantly hilarious. But it’s not clear if this was intentional.

 Fifty Shades of Grey might be the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on Americans.

Since 2011, when the first book in E. L. James's trilogy was released, we have heard endlessly about how readers (primarily women) were consuming James's novels, even though they were written in a style that might be called "word salad with lite-BDSM dressing." The words were meant to make you blush — and keep reading chapter after chapter, like a competitive eater reaching for the next set of chicken wings.It comes as a surprise, then, that the filmmakers went in a completely opposite direction. The first Fifty Shades movie is a surprisingly hilarious piece of cinema that's equal parts sci-fi and romantic comedy.

What began as a tale of a young woman falling in love with an older gentleman with kinky tastes has morphed and twisted in the hands of director Sam Taylor-Johnson into a story that involves a young, weather-manipulating woman who falls in love with a teleporting incubus whose greatest weakness is the banal pleasure of contract law.