Review: Fifty Shades Freed

The Greys (Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan) are now fully wedded, but Christian’s brooding jealousy bullshit and the spectre of creepy stalker Hyde (Eric Johnson) don’t make for much of a honeymoon period. Arielle Kebbel provides a source of jealousy for the new Mrs. Grey.

Continuing with the garbage soap opera plotting of the previous “Fifty Shades Darker”, this 2018 nonsense from formerly talented director James Foley (“At Close Range”, “Glengarry Glen Ross”) is exceptionally dull. Like the previous two films, this is a “Gossip Girl” guide to S&M for the Twi-Hard crowd. Yeah, I know the rating supposedly prevents younger folk from seeing it, but this is the tamest and lamest excursion into S&M you’ll ever come across (And the franchise started life as “Twilight” fan-fiction, creepily enough). The sex here is tedious and tame.

Worst of all, this is the third film about a completely mismatched couple who ought to be happy apart from one another. 5 minutes in and Mr. Grey is once again being a controlling piece of shit with disturbingly misogynistic violent kinks. This creep has given the girl three film’s worth of reasons to run away, and the chick never does. Because as creepy as he is, she’s completely useless, weak, and bubble-brained. It doesn’t help that star Jamie Dornan still looks like Andy Murray. Andy Murray may be a solid tennis player, but he’s a black hole of charisma. For me, Dakota Johnson’s hot body was the only thing keeping me (barely) awake in a film where the supposedly hunky S&M guy is seen and heard playing piano and singing a Paul Bloody McCartney song. Ugh.

The script here is just awful, with Niall Leonard adapting wife E.L. James’ novel. One of the worst things is, being that it follows on from the previous film, this supposedly evil Hyde fellow proves to be like the series’ equivalent of Voldermort; Lying dormant/inert for far too long to be an effective villain. His reason for doing everything he does is incredibly dumb, too. It’s the corniest, TV cliché bullshit twist you’ve heard of. Like bad “Law & Order” or “Murder She Wrote” type stuff. ***** SPOILER ALERT ***** The absolute worst thing, though? Introducing a child into the central relationship. There’s a staggeringly large amount of problems with that. For starters, it’s an unplanned pregnancy and the father’s a super-controlling piece of shit who gets his jollies from administering punishment to a woman who quite clearly doesn’t actually enjoy it and is only going through with it because she’s stupidly in love with the wrong man. ***** END SPOILER ***** Also not helping matters is the character turn that is completely obvious from a certain character’s first scene in the film. A blind person could spot it from a mile away.

Lame MTV S&M nonsense made simply to earn money off the books and the R&B/pop soundtrack. The characters are revolting, the screenplay insipid and insulting, and the film entirely dull.

Rating: D