This marriage is not made in heaven
Fifty Shades has one last fling. ★☆ review,
Hang up the chains and lock the Red Room: Our painfully unsexy cinematic nightmare is about over.
Director James Foley’s ridiculous finale Fifty Shades Freed ★☆☆☆; rated R; now showing) actually does manage to be the best of the BDSM bore-fests in the forgettable erotic saga based on E.L. James’ Fifty Shades novels. Or perhaps it’s just the result of being whipped into submission by the incessantly soapy drama, far-fetched thriller aspects and sex scenes with the heat of day-old Domino’s.
Even as the trilogy that began with 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey draws to a close, there is still zero chemistry between overly dominant ultra-rich Seattle dude Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and his book-editor amour Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson). They flirted in a hardware store, defiled most every inch of Grey’s penthouse digs and, as
Freed opens, are finally getting married. They bike around the Louvre and jetski along Paloma Beach on their French honeymoon, but drama constantly haunts these two lovebirds. Christian can’t stop trying to control every aspect of his new wife’s life, and although she’s still jaw-droppingly naïve — “You own this?” she says when pulling up to Grey’s plane, not yet aware of the household bank balance — Anastasia starts to fight back in a bit of welcome (and way overdue) empowerment.
Yet they inexplicably don’t have the whole “Do we want to have kids?” talk until after they’re hitched, which leads to a major conflict later in the film. “I’m not ready to share you with anyone,” Christian says, adding one more red flag to the multitude with this guy. Also not helping: the return of Ana’s old boss/ stalker Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), who has gone from ordinary book editor to super-villainous saboteur with master hacking skills rather quickly.
Ludicrous situations are a hallmark of this franchise, and Freed lives up to expectation: Much of the movie is narrative nonsense leading to the next round of nakedness — a pint of ice cream gives it up for the cause in one scene, while the high-end sex toys come out for a lust session set to a slowed- down Jessie J cover of James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good). Somewhere, Paul McCartney’s soul dies a little when Dornan’s Christian randomly warbles his way through Maybe I’m Amazed on a swanky Aspen weekend.
While Mr. Grey has always been a cold fish in these movies, there are more reasons than ever for Ana to leave this tool. He’s like a broken thermometer with his mood swings, and he actually uses the Red Room to passive-aggressively punish Ana for “misbehaving.”
These movies in the past have seemed like an escapist lark, but in the era of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements, him taking off her bikini top as foreplay and telling her, “Tomorrow, I’m going to glue this on you” — after a jealousy-fueled incident when he had a conniption after finding her topless on a nude beach — just comes off as uncomfortably creepy.
To her credit, Johnson turns in her best Shades stuff here as Ana puts a haughty architect (Arielle Kebbel) in her place and finally calls Christian on his legion of personal issues. Too bad it’s not enough to save everything else about this whole silly affair’s fumbling climax.