After two dreadful, agonizing years, the torture can finally stop as the final, “climactic” conclusion to the “epic” “Fifty Shades Trilogy” comes out in theaters.
2016’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” was really bad, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it an abomination. 2017’s “Fifty Shades Darker” was one of the worst films I had ever seen. Now, I don’t even know which is which for “Fifty Shades Freed,” because I’ve gotten used to the incredibly ludicrous, insanely dull, and laughably horrid writing and characters.
Opening with the wedding of Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and entrepreneur Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), the film follows the married life of Steele and Grey as they go on various vacations and struggle through their respective jobs while a man from Anastasia’s past comes back to haunt her.
If you read the story and felt as though it sounded off, it’s because it doesn’t sound like a story at all. The film simply follows Christian and Ana going off to different getaway spots and never has a concise, focused plot. It never feels as though it understands what it wants to be or what it wants to focus on. For the most part it just focuses on Ana’s married life with Christian, where they cook dinner, go out, and have a lot of sex together. Oh, and the last 15-20 minutes is a race against time to save Ana’s friend from a stalker from her past.
This is how the film is structured in the final cut (and I’m not kidding): They get married, have sex, go boating, have sex, go hiking with friends, have sex, get chased by a stalker, have sex……
As you can probably guess, it fails miserably at being the one thing it was structured to be: sexy. In between moments of conflict and moments of character (which barely ever happen), the filmmakers will insert an obligatory sex scene that literally only serves the purpose of having a sex scene because it thinks it’s being “sexy,” when in actuality it feels more uncomfortable and awkward when you watch it.
Again, the story has no fluidity to it and never seems to drive forward with a purpose. All it does is follow Ana and Christian around and that’s it. Whenever a touching moment between them happens and they bond, they immediately forget about it and move on to something else.
The characters themselves don’t help the plot whatsoever, especially with the writing they are given. Ana and Christian, much like in the previous films, continue to lack any sort of chemistry that would make them a match made in heaven. If anything, they have one of the most unstable, illogical relationships I’ve seen in any film. Ana seems to be a rule-breaking rebel who never cares for anybody else but her own needs, while Christian is a stuck-up, authoritative figure who acts more like an overprotective father than a loving husband.
The writing doesn’t help either. Johnson and Dornan are given cringe-worthy, unconventional, out-of-nowhere dialogue that almost turn it into a comedy of sorts. And it actually does for a few scenes.
It’s because of this that I feel incredibly sorry for Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, since they do try to work with what they got, and they’re aren’t necessarily that bad in the movie. I just hope they are given better material in the future.
Overall, “Fifty Shades Freed” is exactly what you expected to be. We’ve had incredible new trilogies in the past few years that are worthy of praise, such as “Captain America” and the “Planet of the Apes” reboot. The fact that a trilogy like “Fifty Shades” is able to exist baffles me.
Even though it sometimes goes into the vein of “so bad it’s good,” those moments aren’t enough to savor the embarrassingly poor quality that makes up “Fifty Shades Freed.”