Review: Fifty Shades Freed
Can we just stop to give the Fifty Shades franchise thanks for sticking to a trilogy rather than dragging itself out for five fucking movies, all reiterating the fact that Bella’s a needy little cunt. Seriously I’m happy that I don’t have to go on any further, not because Fifty Shades Freed is a terrible film to sit through, but because I’m honestly struggling to think about what even happened and I really don’t want to put myself through it again. Where the parent franchise Twilight was just bad acting, bad writing and bad everything all at once, Fifty Shades ends itself by earning the award for dullest trilogy ever.
When we last left Christian and Ana they had gotten engaged and Ana’s slightly rapey ex-boss Jack Hyde had been left dangling in the wind like the most obvious fucking plot thread since they froze Han in carbonite. We kick off this film with the Grey’s on their Honeymoon only to be cut short by Jack breaking into Christian’s office and stealing some personal files. Christian immediately calls in a security team and starts going back to his possessive roots and demanding to know where Ana is at all times while Ana wants to enjoy a little freedom with her friends.
Then Jack is caught and arrested about 40 minutes into the film and the next hour is watching Christian and Ana deal with newlywed bliss, arguments, difficulties with their friends and eventually a shock pregnancy before we loop back around to Jack for the finale just so we can manufacture some tension. Cause the thing missing from this shitty BDSM romance was a fucking kidnapping plot.
The story at this point is so obviously second nature that it often felt like they were making it up as they went along, the first half included a fucking car chase pulled out of their ass then once Jack’s out of the picture they just kept the film going with pointless side-story after pointless side-story, Christian buys a nice house and the decorater is flirting with himonly to be told off by Ana and never mentioned again. They take a trip to Aspen with their friends and family where Ana thinks Christian’s brother Elliot is cheating on her friend Katherine only to be revealed that he bought an engagement ring for her. Ana gets pregnant is starts an argument between the two.
That last one actually lasts a bit longer but for such a big moment it’s pushed quite heavily into the sidelines. I don’t even know why I’m surprised or pissed off at it but the story is a mess and makes no effort to hide that fact, even the end reveal of why Jack is being a prick feels pulled out of so many asses it has BDSM trilogy series behind it.
Acting was about as you expected, I can’t speak for the side characters when everything about them felt forced, I didn’t even realise that Elliot was suppose to be Christian’s brother until he explicitly talked about them growing up and Rita Ora stuck out like a sore thumb because she’s clearly not an actress. Kim Basinger appeared for all of 14 seconds and said zero lines as far as I can remember, shame cause I thought with her slightly paedophiliac history with Christian that might have been something worth following up on, but nope, nothing.
I will give Johnson and Dornan some credit, after three films together I think this is the most comfortable they’ve been with each other and it comes across, I can’t remember much about the other two but this felt like the most sexually explicit and part of that came from the two of them having seemingly broken the tension. Neither Christian nor Ana are great or even good characters, Christian too often comes across like the villain in his own story with his constant refusal to do anything normally and live up to his own decree of being ‘Fifty Shades of Fuck Up’ – his best scene in the trilogy is in the last film when he treated his ex-submissive like a dog and it was way creepier than they wanted it to be – and Ana being dishwater dull when the film wants her to play up being serious and couldn’t find a character arc to save her life.
BUT... and this might sound odd, I found myself believing their relationship more in this film than in any of the others. I had a similar problem with Twilight where I didn’t understand why the two leads in such a terrible relationship was the driving romantic force of the film but unlike Edward and Bella there were point where I could see why they were a couple, a scene where Ana cut Christians hair had a lot more sexual chemistry than anything I’d seen in the series before, a sneaky midnight fuck in Aspen had the closest thing to pure and simple fun that had been sorely lacking from the trilogy until now and even the series best BDSM scene was here when Christian tied Ana up and set a vibrator on her only to have the whole scene ruined when it turned out he was using it as punishment and not in the fun way.
Looking back on the trilogy, you trim out the fat, tidy up the writing and you have one or two semi-decent films about a happy, sexually-free couple dealing with the husband’s past sexual trauma. But we have that, instead with have a bucket of bog-water to pass off as sex appeal.
James Foley returned as Director and just like last time, I can’t say jack-shit about what he brings to the table because I’m almost 90% certain that he’s just an available name and this whole film is just made by a committee, insert dialogue here for 15 minutes, begin argument number 12, obligatory sex scene here. There’s nothing here to indicate that Foley had a voice or a vision passed what he was given on paper, granted that could be because it’s a fucking Fifty Shades films but when you’re already working with nothing, giving no effort just stands out all the more.
Because of the Jack-Factor the film laughably tries to insert tension and it’s as bad as you think, the aforementioned car chase is Ana – the previously dull as dicks virgin who knew nothing about music or buttplugs – expertly driving a sports car through traffic with zero effort to make it feel like she’s in danger and the whole kidnapping plot at the end of the film honest to god takes up the last ten minutes and feels like they realised they needed an ending so pulled it out of their ass, never giving any plot point a chance to breath, Ana needs ransom money, can’t tell Christian, takes the money, Christian thinks she’s fucking off, goes after her going after Jack. I could write an entire film around that premise alone and they waste it on a shitty ending to a shitty movie. The only praise I can give this film is that the sex scenes at least have some moments of fun and (believe it or not) almost sexiness to them but that’s entirely down to Dornan and Johnson actually finding some decent chemistry with each other after 3 of these fucking things.
Looking back I have to say that Fifty Shades Freed is probably the best film in the trilogy but don’t count that as high-praise. The first film was nearly offensive with how it portrayed a clearly abusive relationship but at least it had something going on, the second eased up on the stalker vibes but had next to nothing for a storyline. With Freed the problem of no plot still exists but call it Stockholm Syndrome but Ana and Christian’s relationship for the first time felt almost genuine, had they not forced the tension by making Christian a controlling dick I might have actually believed they liked each other. So on the basis of being the most tolerable of the three this is objectively the best, but it’s still a pile of dog shit and high contender for worst of the year.
3/10