2051. Fifty Shades Freed (2018)

Starring: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson

Director: James Foley

Running Time: 105 mins

Fifty Shades Freed is an American film and the third and final instalment of the Fifty Shades series. After Anastasia and Christian get married, they attempt to build a life together, but the dark presence of Jack Hyde threatens their relationship.

We’ve been through this twice before, and I really couldn’t care less any more. Fifty Shades Of Grey stunned me with just how dull and underwhelming it was (particularly given the worldwide hype at the time 3 years ago), while Fifty Shades Darker was just hatefully bad. Now, as this pointless series comes to an end, I can safely say that it’s all been a whole lot of wasted time, as Fifty Shades Freed offers up an underwhelming, inconsistent and frankly tedious finale, pushing you through one last exhaustingly dull edition of what should be considered one of the worst franchises in cinematic history.

The weirdest thing about this finale to the series is that it takes the story in a completely different direction to what’s already been established. While that may sound initially promising given how bad everything has been prior to it, the way the plot goes here isn’t just boring, but random and stupid, bringing no extra drama or intrigue to the table, but instead proving that the series totally ran out of ideas after the second instalment.

The first film was all about the risqué nature of showing graphic sex scenes on the big screen, while the second attempted to craft some sort of Eyes Wide Shut-inspired mystery and drama. The third, for some reason, decides to be a crime thriller, complete with car chases, kidnappings, and all the rest.

On the plus side, that does make it better than Fifty Shades Darker, simply because the more conventional (albeit totally unearned, jarring and poorly-written) nature of the crime story means that you can at least relate to things on a far simpler level.

On the downside, the whole decision to randomly jump to being a crime thriller is absolutely laughable, and as the film tries to inject some energy, tension and thrills into proceedings, I was left wetting myself with its pathetic ideas and twists, worsened by yet another god-awful screenplay complete with terrible dialogue, as well as some of the worst performances of the whole series.

Jamie Dornan is as wooden as ever as Christian Grey, a character that serves next to no purpose in the movie apart from making some things a little more difficult than they need be, Dakota Johnson looks like she’s just given up trying third time out as the tedious Anastasia Steele, while the majority of the supporting cast feel like they’ve been plucked out of B-rate movies after all of the A-listers that were introduced in the last film are bizarrely absent from this one, with Kim Basinger and Bella Heathcote nowhere to be seen, while others just make a few cameo appearances.

So, with the exception of the two tedious leads who I haven’t cared about for a second in the whole series, the rest of the characters are random people that you don’t know anything about, and are shoehorned in to try and make the film’s finale a little more exciting, by completely doing away with the story that the previous movies were trying to set up.

Of course, there’s still all that rubbish ‘provocative’ stuff for the people who have somehow enjoyed the series so far, but for the rest of us, Fifty Shades Freed feels like a rushed, dull and particularly random finale to a stupid film franchise, and one that I won’t be rushing back to watch in a hurry, which is why I’m giving this a 2.0 overall.