[rating=1.00]
The zeitgeist has never exactly been picky. The ebbs and flows of popular culture don’t necessarily rely on discerning taste when it lifts what it lifts to the forefront of the collective consciousness. What’s “in” and what’s “good” don’t need to overlap for a thing to be exalted and ascend to the highest levels to become A Phenomenon.
Whatever else you might say about, you can’t deny that Fifty Shades is precisely that. We can wax philosophical all we want about the hows and whys of its inexplicable popularity, but that doesn’t change the fact that the series has sold hundreds of millions of copies as a novel and is well on its way to topping a billion dollars combined at the global box office.
We can call it vapid, boring, unsexy, and dumb—which it is—but that doesn’t change any facts surrounding the bottom line. All we can do is be thankful that it’s over. The tide is moving out and, with it, the zeitgeist will bring forth something new. We can rejoice, however, in the knowledge that there’s no way in Hell the Next Big Thing will be as intellectually devoid as what came before it. No matter what our culture chooses to exalt next, it just isn’t possible that it will ever be as dumb as Fifty Shades.
But it’s over now. Hallelujah, it’s complete. The conclusion of the trilogy, Fifty Shades Freed, has hit theaters and after the next week or two we never have to see, hear, or think about Fifty Shades ever again. We did it, guys. It’s over. We really are free.
This movie has been hanging over our heads for a year now, a vague threat that began with the trailer included at the end of last year’s Fifty Shades Darker. With that threat, though, came a promise: “We’re almost done, guys.” So, if nothing else, at least there’s that.
Of all the baffling aspects of this asinine series, the most baffling is how they somehow got worse as they progressed. That’s no small feat for a series that begins by scraping the bottom of the barrel. How do you accomplish getting worse than that? Does it require effort? At this point, the barrel has been scraped so hard that the bottom no longer exists; they’ve transcended the barrel and moved right into a hole in the ground.
The latest entry finds Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) beginning their new life as a married couple. Their newlywed bliss is interrupted however when Steele’s former boss, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), returns to make the couple pay for his getting fired at the end of Fifty Shades Darker.
That’s…pretty much it, actually. The plot against the Greys means that the series now includes car chases, knives to throats, and gun fights, all of which are at least as bland and boring as the movie’s depiction of sex, which itself fails to be even the slightest bit titillating.
When your movie about sex fails to be sexy, you’ve got a problem. This is a problem inherent with the series, of course. How can you make a movie based on a series of books about hardcore, kinky sex without veering into the unmarketable, doomed-to-failure, NC-17 rating? The Fifty Shades movies aren’t even the plain yogurt version of the books, they’re the lite plain yogurt version of the books, which give you the illusion of being naughty with none of the commitment.
So it is with Fifty Shades Freed. It’s not even so bad it’s brilliant, like, say, Showgirls. It’s just sort of…there. Oh sure, you might laugh, but lacking any sort of knowing winks or smiles, you’re very clearly laughing at the film, rather than playing along with it. You laugh because it’s that or scream. You laugh because, should you find yourself with your ass in a seat, what other option might you have? In this case, your laughter is a defense, a wall to protect you from the sheer inanity you’re seeing on the screen.
You’ll see things like a car chase that we only really know exists because they film tells us it does—it really is the most inconsequential car chase scene in movie history. You’ll see things like Anastasia straight faced saying the line “boobs in boobland.” You’ll see things like a supposedly terrified victim of kidnapping who can barely manage to emote anything for longer than a second or two.
The only redeeming quality of Fifty Shades Freed is that it ends, and with that ending comes the end of the franchise. We can now move on. We can live our lives without ever thinking about this series again. It can take its rightful place as a bizarre blip on the cultural radar that we can laugh about when documentaries start exploring the 2010s in the 2030s or 40s. Deep breaths, y’all. We’re almost there.
Fifty Shades Freed is now playing in theaters everywhere.
