Every Tuesday, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from The Asylum, the company that brought you Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, and Alien vs. Hunter. This week, things get kinky(ish) with Bound.
Fifty Shades of Mockbusters: Bound
Michelle is a repressed divorcee who meets a guy in an empty restaurant. Within minutes of their first conversation, the handsome stranger—Ryan—offers her a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she explains. He looks at her for a second. Then, in the flat, unaffected voice of a sociopath, he says, “Yeah, you do. Just suck and blow.”
Welcome to the weird, uncomfortable eroticism of Bound, The Asylum’s bargain bin version of Fifty Shades of Grey. This is a film made by people whose concept of S&M involves missionary sex while blindfolded. A lot of moviegoers complained that the cinematic version of Fifty Shades was bloodless, but nothing compares to Bound, a movie with long boardroom scenes punctuated by short bursts of candlelit lovemaking and awkward foreplay.
Bound stars Charisma Carpenter as Michelle the divorcee. You might remember her from her many years on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel. In those shows, she evolved from a bitchy cheerleader into one of the most sympathetic and well-rounded characters in the cast. Here, she’s topless in the first ten seconds of the film. She’s certainly kept in shape over the years, and she’s the only one actually trying to act in this movie, but it’s still a little depressing to see a well-known TV star grimacing her way through whipping scenes.
Ryan, her partner in kink, is played by Bryce Draper, which is the actor’s real name, apparently. He does not enunciate his words, nor add any emotion to his lines. Even in the last twenty minutes, when he’s revealed to be a (spoiler alert) crazy person, he somehow manages to shout every word without any feeling at all. He’s a weird blank at the center of the story, and Michelle’s instant attraction to him makes no sense.
The basic plot is this: Michelle is unhappy. She meets Ryan, who introduces her to S&M. He interferes with her life, which threatens her job and her family. She breaks things off. He reveals he’s psychotic. Things get crazy. It basically starts out like Fifty Shades of Grey, but morphs into one of those 90’s erotic thrillers where one character becomes obsessed with someone else and starts dismantling their lives. (Think of Single White Female or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Better yet, watch those movies instead.)
Clearly, this is not your typical Asylum mockbuster. There aren’t any robots or sword fights or iffy CGI hell hounds. And the whole thing feels like everyone involved—actors, writers, directors, best boys—were working outside of their comfort zones. The filmmakers try to jazz things up with constantly tilting camera work, but there’s only so many angles in which to view a board room.
And that brings us to the biggest issue with this film: the pacing. So much of the hour and a half runtime is spent with Michelle’s job. She works with her father (Daniel Baldwin) at Mulan Properties, a real estate firm where everyone except Michelle wants to give up and sell the company. From the looks of things, she has one of those magical movie jobs that’s 90% board meetings and 10% lunches with clients. We’re meant to care about her job, but everything is so vague that the screenwriter might as well replace the dialogue with each character mumbling “Real estate. Real estate. Real estate,” over and over again.
Until the wacked out climax, the only thing keeping me awake were the moments of unintentional humor. There’s the scene where Terrell Owens shows up as himself for no reason. There are the overwrought lines of dialogue that Bryce Draper delivers with all the passion of a robot: “I’m your daddy. Be afraid of me.” There are the conversations that happen in voice over during the sex scenes, which make it seem like Michelle and Ryan are communicating telepathically. There are the slightly flabby extras at the S&M club, standing awkwardly in the background and repeating the same movements over and over.
My single favorite scene, though, comes early in the film, when Michelle’s daughter asks, “Mom. What’d you make me for dinner?” Michelle does this weird eye roll, as if she wanted to say: “Oh, honey. You want dinner AGAIN?” Then the scene cuts to mother and daughter ordering food at a dimly lit bar with no other customers. It’s low budget filmmaking at its chintziest.
Thankfully, the movie shakes things up in the last twenty minutes. Michelle catches Ryan seducing her daughter and she finally realizes she’s had enough. She basically tortures him and sends him to jail. Back in the board room, she impresses/seduces her new client, and all is right with the world. Once again, The Asylum pulls out all the stops in the final stretch. It’s not good filmmaking, but it’s certainly less dull than the rest of the film.
For a movie that is meant to be titillating and steamy, Bound is dull and kind of sad. The story is ostensibly about Michelle’s empowerment, but I couldn’t help watching this and wishing that Charisma Carpenter had been empowered enough to just said no to her agent.
Early in the film, Ryan tells Michelle, “This is my world. You’re not ready for it.” Well, the world isn’t ready for a movie like this. It doesn’t need a movie like this. Perhaps the only good thing about this film is that it makes Fifty Shades look better in comparison. And it’s not, thank God, a trilogy.