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Those expecting razor-sharp epigrams and bonnets in Ealing Studio's new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray may be disappointed.
It is not for the squeamish either: directed by Oliver Parker, the witticisms are there but only between the sex, drugs, violence and snuff.
Yet the story of the feckless youth who is so transfixed by a portrait painted of him by a friend that he sells his soul to hang on to his looks - first published in 1890 - has surely never felt more current.
Ben Barnes plays Wilde's Dorian, who believes it would be more fun to remain permanently twentysomething than age like everyone else.
He's the boy who fights and never gets a scratch, drinks and never looks hungover and generally lives a life of consequence-free debauchery.
While Dorian, who stays dewy eyed and "gleaming" while his portrait ages, has generally been viewed by readers as a freak, today a worldwide beauty industry aimed at achieving roughly the same results is worth an estimated $350 billion.
Much of the money goes on products promising that never-a-day-older-Dorian effect.
Yet today the industry's most famous catchphrase, "because you're worth it", sees vanity not as a dangerous sin but as an entitlement.
Poor Dorian was created 100 years too soon: Botox could have saved him from a pact with the devil.
Looks go further now than perhaps they ever did, from Brand Beckham to the whole idea of a "supermodel". But for all Wilde's stance as an aesthete, Dorian Gray isn't just a parable about beauty.
It's the definitive portrait of what happens when someone becomes invincible. I can understand what producer Barnaby Thompson means when he says that Gray brings to mind Mick Jagger: "The book still resonates today because of the fundamental theme of 'what if you were allowed to do anything?'" Think of Michael Jackson, to whom, apparently, not even his own doctors could say no.
Dorian swiftly learns the lessons of his urbane friend Lord Henry Wotton, played by Colin Firth, who delights in persuading his naïve protégé that the "only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it".
In the novel, this hedonism, in which Dorian can indulge while looking "unspotted" by his excesses, is left largely to the imagination as he slides from pretty-boy-about-town to feckless monster.
In the update, which comes close to a horror film, we are spared no extreme of bad behaviour.
For all his foppish good looks, Ben Barnes's Dorian has a glint in his eye that's half charming and half psychotic.
He starts to makes the Rolling Stones look like the kind of boys you'd like to take home for tea.
This limitless freedom for which Dorian falls is now a greater fantasy than ever. Our modern-day demons lurk on the TV screen rather than in the canvas of seductive portraits.
Forget artistry: "We want fame, money and girls" sniggered five total goons - a would-be boy-band - the other Saturday on The X Factor, before it became clear that none of them could hold a note.
Winning any such grisly show is less about talent than accessing that world of limitlessness.
While film-makers often feel the need to persuade us of the "relevance" of literary classics (with sometimes disastrous results), when adapting Wilde there's little need.
For he anticipated modern celebrity: the phenomenon of being so appalling that you fascinate and retain invincibility.
Wotton schools Dorian in his famous mantra that: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about".
Katie Price could not have put it more succinctly.
