I allegedly read Persuasion by Jane Austen but I had to double-check to be sure. Clearly I remember nothing and I haven’t seen any previous movie adaptations so I don’t have a dog in this adaptation hunt. In fact, I wasn’t even planning on watching this Netflix version until I opened the app and my will was weak. But, hey, at least it started strong. Now if only the remaining 90 minutes wasn’t an intolerable slog.

If anything makes this at all watchable, it’s Dakota Johnson. Not just because she’s lovely and lively, but because she gets to be the one person to do something – anything – that livens up this dull creep. They let her talk and wink and smirk at the camera, as if to include us in how silly this whole drawing room nonsense is.

But that’s not nearly enough when the rest of the film is drab, flat, and endless. I’m sure this is one of Jane Austen’s more fascinating books about stupidly rich people without jobs taking entirely too long to get around to just admitting they are in love with each other because they don’t have any other problems. But this adaptation takes that premise and makes it abjectly boring. This movie moves at a snail’s pace if that snail was on downers. It has no elegance or flair or fun camera work to at least make it anything more than a still picture of pretty locations.

I wish I was joking when I say I found loading my dishwasher was more entertaining than this flick. But then I had to figure out how to handle the remaining 95 minutes of my apparently valueless time.

I didn’t handle it well. This movie is just boring. I wish I could say it inspired me to revisit previous adaptations but the idea currently sounds like a special level of literary hell. This flick inspired me to never want to watch another drawing room romance again. Good job, Netflix.

Score: 57