Fifty Shades Freed

"You may call me Mrs. Grey."

Filmology Rating: 1.25 out of 4

My enjoyment of the Fifty Shades trilogy seems to be quickly declining with each installment. Having perhaps foolishly giving the first film a slight pass, then questioning the thriller aspects of the second film, I now question  the actual plot of this film. The melodramatic plot of the film takes only a few minutes to sort out, but the running time of the film is actually an hour and forty-five minutes.  This film is an atrocity to anyone who calls themselves a filmmaker.  The entire point of film is to tell stories with the understanding that not all stories will appeal to everyone.  I can at least understand the point of a film like God’s Not Dead or American Sniper, even though these are films that I found myself not overly enjoying.  The publishers who greenlit a piece of “Twilight” fanfiction smut and tricked an audience who are completely naïve should be held accountable for bringing such tasteless, senseless atrocities to the silver screen.  Perhaps I have seen more poorly crafted films but those films never tried to call themselves high art which manipulate its audience into a cult.   

It’s enraging when you are watching a film and a pop song starts playing for no other reason than to sell you a CD.  The studio is expecting you in the first place to pay too much money to see the film.  Clearly Universal puts little concern into the mental enjoyment of it’s audience while watching one of their films.  Since their end goal is so complacent that they might as well set up a gift shop outside of each theatre that you are obligated to buy something, since you forfeited money to watch this torture of a film.  If the film only included one or two pop songs the egregious act could be forgiven,  but since it does so no less than six times it becomes truly headache inducing. 

The worst question that you can ever ask yourself when leaving a theatre is “Why was this movie made?”.  It’s a dreaded question that every single director and screenwriter should contemplate before tackling a project.  The nepotism factor does need to be addressed when talking about Niall Leonard, the writer of the film, who is married to the author of the books by E.L. James. Leonard also worked on Fifty Shades Darker and I believe the film series took a dramatic dip in quality when he came onto the series.  I heard stories from the set of Fifty Shades of Grey where James was called “uncontrollable” and basically paranoid when lines of dialogue would be changed from her novel to the screen.  While she does have that right as a producer on the film it comes across as complete vanity taking her word basically as gospel and that more talented individuals will only discredit her work.  If the dialogue wasn’t wooden and forced I don’t think any nepotism would be called out.  The script feels like it was written by a freshman in high school who recently found a porn blog and thought it was the most life changing experience of his life.  

Since the script isn’t doing the actors any help,  it would be hard to put all of the lifelessness in the characters onto the actors.  I would like to believe that Dakota Johnson is a good actress. I found her to be one of the best aspects of Fifty Shades of Grey. Dakota Johnson was actually funny and relatable in How to Be Single, but she just always comes across as a wide-eyed innocent bystander to all of the events that are occurring.  While the story would like you to believe that she is strong during the climax of the film,  just kept thinking about how absurd Anastasia was being.  For most of the film she is completely absurd and bipolar, while claiming to understand the situations that she had gotten herself into.  Yes, the man at the end of the film is a complete psychotic lunatic, but the manners in which Anastasia deals with him is completely asinine and I would question any woman looking up to her as a good role model.  As for Jamie Dornan, it would have served the plot just as well to have a block of wood play Christian,  since you would gotten the same amount of emotion and intelligence that Dornan gives to the character as the piece of wood would give.            

Watching Fifty Shades Freed made me question if good movies could still be made by Universal or if they only want to focus on single celled populism entertainment. I cannot deny that the crowd who wants to see this film will do so no matter what I say, they are being like sheep lead to the slaughter with no freedom in sight at the end of this tedious pointless film series.     

Rating: Let It Burn

-Jonny G