Dorian Grey is a urine deficient adaptation of the great Oscar Wilde novel.

It’s always a touch tricky when trying to adapt such famous works of fiction for the big screen. And so it was for the team behind Dorian Grey who failed to really ignite the imagination with their take on the Wilde classic. Even without comparing the film to the novel with a kind of standalone objectivism, a hard concept on its own seeing as film criticism is ultimately riddled with subjectivism; the movie is the type you would expect to see on the BBC with their annual flux of period dramas but not at the multiplex. Seeing as it is a period ‘bodice ripping’ drama it will probably have its niche market of largely female, septuagenarians, ect, who lap up this kind of stuff but ultimately it’s probably destined for bargain bins and petrol station check outs.

It’s not because the film does not have some merit. Ben Barnes, who plays Dorian, does a pretty good job in the transformation of the innocent to corrupted, the all-sweetness-and-light pretty boy on the surface with the secretive nocturnal deviant. Ben Chaplin, who plays Basil Hallward the artist infatuated with Dorian, is a revelation with arguably his best performance to date. But overall it’s a poor script and average direction that let this production down.

Which is a real shame, because the novel is rich in content and has all the right ingredients to be potentially a great movie. It’s not one of those hard to envisage novels cinematically. A bigger name in the starring role, an all around better screenplay and a more capable director would have been the way forward.