Fifty Shades Freed

Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) get married and have their blissful, sex-filled honeymoon. But if you thought the sex would stop there, you’d be wrong. The only thing that can stop these two humping is the shocking news that Anastasia is pregnant (dun dun duuuuuun). If that wasn’t enough drama for you, Anastasia has to keep swatting away the hands of women who want to feel up her hubby. Oh yeah, and her old boss, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson) is determined to bring a reign of destruction to the couple’s lives, for some reason.

The script of Fifty Shades Freed is so bad and chain of events so dense that you sometimes wonder whether E.L. James, the genius behind the Fifty Shades trilogy (and I refer to her as such because damn, she made a lot of money from those books), just throws together elements of books she’s read and movies she’s seen in the hope that it will culminate in the perfect drama. What it adds up to, however, is just this mess of a movie, a bad movie that isn’t even fun bad.

Fifty Shades Freed is dumb and infuriating in its absence of logic. To paint you a picture of this, here are some spoiler-free things that happen in the first five minutes of the film. When they pull up to a plane, Anastasia asks Christian if it’s his and is genuinely shocked to learn that it is. Really? After all that they’ve been through over the last few movies, after all the establishments of how much money Christian has, and all the times Christian has brought her to planes, cars, houses, you name it, that he owns, she is STILL shocked that he can afford this? At another point, they’re on the beach, texting one another, while beside each other. It's not cute, just stupid and obnoxious. And then, to give an example of those cringey lines James forces her actors to dictate, Johnson talks about ‘boobs in Boobland’ to refer to the topless women she’s surrounded by.

Aside from Johnson and Dornan, the final instalment of the trilogy sees those characters you don’t know and don’t care about come in, say lines, have conversations that you don’t care about, and then leave the leads to it. Speaking of, there’s a ridiculous amount of sex in this movie. It’s probably the most of any of the Fifty Shades movies. There’s a car sex scene, food-oriented sex scene (prepare for ice cream to be ruined forever…), and the saddest scene in the movie is when Christian won’t have sex with Ana. Honest to God, the sexiest scene in the movie is when Dornan is singing while playing on the piano, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned that way.

If you actually do watch these films for the story and characters (let’s be honest though, most of us are here for the mummy porn), you’ll be happy to see all those plot strands around Ana’s job and Christian’s family get some kind of conclusion, but it’s a struggle to give a crap. Moreover, for a movie called Fifty Shades ‘Freed’, Ana gets bound an awful lot, and Christian still tells her off for what she can and can’t do…