Fifty Shades of bland and boring
Fifty Shades Freed (R16, 105 mins) Directed by James Foley ★1⁄2
I’ll go to my grave telling anyone bored or drunk enough to listen that the original Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) scrubs up in a way doubters who have never either read the book or seen the film, and yet still have a strong opinion about both on Twitter, simply wouldn’t believe.
Maybe a dose of critic’s confirmation bias slipped into that review. But as soon as I heard that Sam Taylor-johnson was in the director’s chair for Fifty Shades of Grey, I began to look forward to it ever so slightly more than a root canal or a bike crash.
Taylor-johnson had the terrific and punishingly insightful young John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy on her showreel, as well as a very adult, brilliant short film called Love You More. That was enough to convince me that the first adaptation of E L James’ muchpawed and dog-eared opus was in a safer pair of hands than it might really deserve.
And sure enough, that first film transformed James’ lumpen prose and deeply nettlesome fantasising into something that looked – maybe, if you squinted – a bit like the fable of female empowerment the book’s defenders had always claimed it was.
By the time part two – Fifty Shades Darker – rolled out in 2017, normal service had been resumed. Taylor-johnson had left and been replaced by safe pair of male hands, James Foley. Foley might have had the stormingly good, wildly hyper-masculine, Glengarry Glen Ross on his CV, but there wasn’t much doubt he was hired to do exactly what the film’s producers dictated on Darker. There was no sign of Taylorjohnson’s unexpected deftness and subversion.
Which gets us here, 2018, and the last (please, goddess) instalment of the trilogy. Foley is back at the helm, as is veteran camera-bloke John Schwartzman.
Which means two men in their late 50s and early 60s are in charge of creative choices that will define this aimed-at-women film. Then there’s the fact E L James’ own husband Niall Leonard has adapted the screenplay from his wife’s novel, and is hardly likely to have been interrogating and toughening the source material in the way Kelly Marcel (Bronson, Saving Mr Banks) did when she wrote the first film.
Add it all up, and Fifty Shades Freed was pretty much doomed to be exactly the highly glossed, deeply tedious and incontrovertibly lousy pile of old rubbish that it is.
Freed plays out like it has been more assembled than written.
Things happen because there is a 105-minute running time to fill and even Fifty Shades’ target audience would be yawning if there was nothing to look at for all that time but a parade of naked product placement, and a handful of (non-naked) Ken and Barbie couplings.
Chugging away where the story should be is a half-hearted examination of Anastasia and Christian’s newly married status and the trials and tribulations of wondering which Audi to drive and which house to fly one’s private jet to for the weekend.
But the first two films explored and then explained away the supposed causes of the sub/dom dynamic of the relationship. What was spiky and occasionally confronting in the first film is just a warmed-over retread here.
Dakota Johnson as Anastasia and Jamie Dornan as Christian are the film’s only real strengths. They are smart, warm and watchable.
Eric Johnson returns as Jack Hyde, a cartoonishly villainous character.
This is a smug, bloodless, bland and mostly mindless corporate product. – Graeme Tuckett