Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: It finally happened — kinky couple Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) have finally gotten married. Of course, with Christian’s deep seated issues from childhood abuse, matrimony starts out quite rocky, even though he tries to meet Anastasia halfway. Complicating things even more, Anastasia gets pregnant which sends Christian’s world spinning. Making things even more complicated is that Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), Anastasia’s former boss who was fired for sexually harassing her in the last movie, has begun stalking her, sabotaging Christian’s business, and generally trying to destroy their lives. Life has become a hurricane and there’s only so much that kinky bondage sex will solve.

Review: Fifty Shades Freed was long, pointless, and bloated with constant montages and sex scenes. So, you know, par for the course at this point. Pretty much every complaint I had from the previous film stands here — Christian Grey is overly controlling and borderline abusive, the plot is non-existent, the characters are bland and uninteresting, and if you cut out all the sex scenes and montages, the movie would barely make its runtime.

The movie practically requires you to care about everything that happened before in movies past. Considering how this franchise is a wet garbage fire that pays more attention to its leads’ sexcapades than its other characters, that’s a pretty tall order. No joke, I had to lean over and ask who certain characters were numerous times, which isn’t good when side characters reference plot points that were barely memorable in the past movies. On top of that, there are even more pointless characters and plot points mentioned, like a flirty contractor (Arielle Kebbel) that has the hots for the Grey men or a wedding proposal between Christian’s brother (Luke Grimes) and Anastasia’s old roommate (Eloise Mumford). Kinda asking a lot of us, don’t you think?

Oh, but what the film lacks in plot, it tries to make up for with the subplot, which is almost like some kind of action-thriller. There are car chases, a ransom, arson, and other makings of intense drama and action… except our James Bond/Liam Neeson/Charlize Theron/what-have-you are Anastasia and Christian Grey. That’s not even remotely an upgrade. On top of that, Jack is implausibly competent, somehow able to outsmart Christian’s airtight security three times over. Add to that some uncomfortable violence against a pregnant Anastasia and congratulations, you’ve soiled the most engaging part of your movie. The most engaging part of the movie which was relegated to a subplot. What even is this series?

But do you want to know the craziest thing? This is actually the best of the Fifty Shades movies. I know that’s a low bar to clear, but it had several funny lines and it was nice to see Anastasia assert herself and put Christian in his place, even if I’m not convinced that he actually learned anything. Does this save the movie? No, but at this point, I’ll take what I can get. At the very least we can say the series ended on a high… on a tolerable… on a mediocre… at least we can say the series ended.

Fun Tidbit: This film could have taken a disastrous turn behind the scenes as they were filming in Nice, France during the 2016 terrorist attacks. In a story involving arson and kidnapping, disaster would have made things… uncomfortable to say the least.