Fifty Shades Freed Movie Review

Fifty Shades Freed frees audiences from a sex-crazed franchise

I grew up with a mother that found her principle holiday entertainment in the tactless mush that is the Hallmark Channel. T.V. movies that maneuver without rhyme or reason, where glossy smiles are escorted with zero plot, character development, or predicament unless of course the hassle of the middle-class white protagonists struggling but financially grounded family business or a break up that will undoubtedly end with a makeup kiss counts as a cinematic quandary. Yet even by these standards, 'Fifty Shades Free' feels barren.

If only the E.L. James inspired films would have used the safe word in the first chapter, the abuse that this franchise has caused audiences would have been put to rest and I would not be endorsing the reader to skip the third installment. Here, the crusade of kinky sex, synthetic dialogue, and cliche romance is accompanied beat for beat with pop music as forgettable as the characters. Director James Foley's film blatantly flaunts it's elitist couples fatigues the same way it does the lavish lifestyle of the one percent, showcasing vacation homes and Audi's with the same aura of chatoyant glean. In attempts to layer the cliche battle of equality in marriage with concrete suspense, a subplot thriller is erected to keep it's target audience "guessing" as to what comes next.

The problems keep arising, but the weight of urgency and emotion is never present, as conflicts become flimsy placement holders between erotic sex scenes that make use of everything from locks to vanilla ice cream. Whereas this movie is less than the sum of its parts, it does find modernist virtue in it's empowered female lead. Anastasia Steele( her last name becomes Grey after the first scene), unlike in past installments, is now married and stands up for herself and for her husband who she continuously has to save emotionally and physically. That being said, the two (Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan) are vessels for commendable performances, the lines they are given, however, are skewed in immediacy for the consumer. With punchlines so inhumane they could have been written by the infamous director Tommy Wiseau.

Camping it up in pushing the boundaries of minimalism is Foley who bases the three-act structure in the utmost conventional sense. The movie moves at a snail's pace through the first act introducing the characters, in act two we have the confrontation of the problem and act three the climax and resolution. Replacing artifice and intellectual thinking for what was supposed to be a thrilling sense of energy and intimacy, spoiler alert neither is achieved. Along the way, we move from vacation home to vacation home and eventually to a kidnapping that is laughable, in fact, the entire film is comical for all the wrong reasons. Nonetheless, I can think of worse ways than to spend two hours of my weekend then drudging through this, I could be watching paint dry or read the dictionary.

Yet remarkably this could be the finest third installment of 2018, I certainly left the theater excited, that this is the very last one of these I will have to attend. As our handcuffs are unlocked, we are finally freed from the atrocity that is this repugnant sex crazed franchise.