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The problem with the "Fifty Shades" franchise—if it can be called a franchise—is not so much its portrait of a controlling man manipulating his lover past her comfort zone, although earlier installments feature such scenes. The problem is there's not enough sex and too much ... everything else. Kidnappings. Office drama. There's a gun in a drawer. People are stalked. A helicopter crashes in the mountains. High-speed car chases! When compared to, say, some of the films of Catherine Breillat , the "Fifty Shades" movies come off as coy '60s films about marriage, commitment, and—adorably—male ineptitude in the kitchen. ("Fifty Shades Freed," the latest film, shows Christian Grey trying to make dinner for his new wife and burning the tomato sauce, as she looks on affectionately.) There's a conservative streak in E.L. James' books, an acceptance of all of the "symbols" making up the heterosexual status quo: diamond rings, marriage, house-hunting. What would the stories be like if they did question the status quo? What would it be like if Anna Steele was not interested in the domesticated trappings of state-approved monogamy, but chasing pure experience because it's fun and exciting? Now that would be truly radical.

But alas, this is not what we talk about when we talk about "Fifty Shades."

At the end of " Fifty Shades Darker ," also directed by James Foley , the emotionally damaged Christian Grey ( Jamie Dornan ), whose penthouse includes 1.) a sex-dungeon room with red leather walls and 2.) a pommel horse, proposed marriage to his virgin-turned-submissive-sex-partner Anastasia Steele ( Dakota Johnson ). "Fifty Shades Freed" starts with the wedding. At first all is bliss, with a couple of kinks—sexually (what's a honeymoon without handcuffs?) and emotionally (he doesn't want her going topless on the beach). They are called back from their honeymoon because a bomb exploded in one of the "Grey Enterprises" warehouses. Security footage reveals the terrorist as Hyde ( Eric Johnson ), Anna's former boss who sexually assaulted her at the first available opportunity. The lengths Hyde will go to to get revenge makes up just one of the many non-sexual plot-lines of "Fifty Shades Freed."

Another aspect of the film is Anna's desire to have a life outside of her marriage. She keeps working at the small publishing house where she was promoted to Fiction Editor while she was on her honeymoon, because that's realistic. In an inadvertently entertaining moment, Anna instructs her team on a book's font size. The film is crowded with events, held together by pop songs: Anna asserts her primacy with a hottie real estate agent making the moves on Christian, Anna's friend gets engaged, there's a spontaneous trip to Aspen, Hyde's on the loose, Anna's in danger, Christian gets wasted. The emotional tension of " Fifty Shades of Grey " and "Fifty Shades Darker," where Anna has hesitations about submitting to his sexual tastes, is gone. Anna loves the sex they have. She feels safe with him. When he's too controlling, she tells him so. They're actually ... a boring couple, truth be told.

These movies are silly, and they're silliest when they get romantic, like the scene when Anna discovers Christian, moody and sensitive, sitting at a grand piano, playing and singing Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed." In that moment, Anna sees him as the little boy tormented by his childhood "in the system." We, however, just see a dumb scene. There are many such moments.

A lot of the cultural commentary on "Fifty Shades" has been worried concern—or outright contempt—about its portrayal of a controlling abusive relationship, where a man gaslights a woman into sex she's not comfortable with. That's not quite what's going on, though. She is willing to walk away from the relationship (and does so in former installments). When she comes back, she comes back on her terms. If everyone's consenting, then what's the problem? There's another aspect of "Fifty Shades" that deserves mention, relevant in particular to our current moment: because of the couple's chosen kink, verbal consent is built into the relationship, even after marriage. Consent is never assumed. She blurts out her safe word at one point, and he stops because those are the rules. She tells him what she didn't like. He apologizes. At one point, he stops what he's doing and asks her if it's all right. She says yes. A little bit later, he checks in with her again, and she gives him verbal consent to keep going. If you want to talk about the utopia of "enthusiastic consent," this is what it looks like.

Christian Grey is an impossible role for an actor. He is pure fantasy, but it's a particular kind of fantasy, emotionally complicated, with night terrors and abandonment issues. Some people are into the hotness of the fantasy of "healing" a damaged partner. It may be unhealthy in the "real world," but it's the stuff of the "Hurt/Comfort" subgenre of fanfic, which could fill every library in the world it's so popular. If that's your freak flag, let it fly. But Dornan never finds a "way in" to this frankly unrealistic bazillionaire-dom. He was so good as the serial killer in the television series " The Fall ," but here—when he has to show Christian's playful side, or emotionally damaged side—he is extremely inhibited.

Dornan's inadequacy is accentuated by Dakota Johnson's natural force of personality and charisma. Throughout, she makes intelligent choices (no small feat, considering the material). She doesn't take any of it too seriously, and yet she takes it seriously enough that she doesn't seem like she's "slumming." A sexy scene involving ice cream works because Johnson turns it into a game she finds amusing. Her sense of humor never leaves her. "Fifty Shades" is pure relationship melodrama, and the role of Anna requires an honest commitment to those aspects of the story. A true test of an actor's talent is how they survive silly or bad material. Dakota Johnson survives. Thrives, even. It will be fun to see what she does next.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Fifty Shades Freed (2018)

Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, and language.

105 minutes

Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele

Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey

Kim Basinger as Elena Lincoln

Eric Johnson as Jack Hyde

Arielle Kebbel as Gia Matteo

Brant Daugherty as Luke Sawyer

James Foley

Writer (based on the novel by)

Niall Leonard

Cinematographer

John Schwartzman
David Clark
Richard Francis-Bruce
Debra Neil-Fisher
Danny Elfman

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Fifty Shades Freed Reviews

With all-time great, comes all time-bad, and 2018 has provided cinephiles with the conclusion, oh I’m sorry, the climax of the worst trilogy of all time, the Fifty Shades trilogy.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4 | Jan 31, 2023

It's as doofily entertaining, eye-rollingly awful, surprisingly steamy, and expectedly boring as all the other Fifty Shades films.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 29, 2021

These movies, I think, are meant to be sexy romps, a bit of fun, but at the end of the series have proven themselves to be ten pounds of sex toys in a five pound bag.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 4, 2021

When things become downright comical, it's nevertheless still watchable in its badness.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | Dec 6, 2020

The simple truth is that Ana and Christian are still wholly unconvincing in their coupling.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.0/4.0 | Sep 7, 2020

This trilogy is the film equivalent of bad sex. Part 1 was awkward foreplay. Part 2 went through the motions with monotonous moves. And now, Part 3 reaches a clumsy climax that's so obviously fake that you just want it to end.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 29, 2020

'Don't miss the climax,' the ads declare. What climax? Fifty Shades Freed falls flat of even reaching a plateau, just flailing around on the floor instead.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jul 23, 2020

Ever wondered what The Room or Birdemic would have looked like with a boardroom of producers and a $55 million budget? Here you go.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | Jul 18, 2020

The romance of Fifty Shades has no sizzle, the melodrama is not dramatic, and the sex - to put it frankly - is not that sexy.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Jul 18, 2020

If ever a franchise were crying out for the female gaze - surely this is it? If only Sam Taylor-Johnson had been given the creative control she desired and stayed on the franchise, we may have ended up with something of better quality.

Full Review | Jul 2, 2020

The cinematic equivalent of a shrug and people picking up a paycheck at the end of the week, and the result is a bland, flaccid wiener of a movie.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 1, 2020

Why isn't this sexy?

Full Review | May 18, 2020

They are the wrong people to star in this movie.

It's way too mainstream for its own good. It's got a host of questionable ethics. But it succeeds in getting a theater of people off. Take that as you will.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2020

It will move us forward as a culture and, at some point, we'll shake our heads, laugh at Fifty Shades Freed, and keep going.

Full Review | Feb 20, 2020

Love's most flummoxing journey has finally reached climax, but what a blandifying, inept "sexy thriller" note things end on.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Nov 6, 2019

It fails when it wants to address the emotional side and it's a shame when it tries to become a thriller for a few minutes. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 30, 2019

The best film in the trilogy. Yet considering the general awfulness of this franchise, this is the equivalent of saying it's better to lose only one finger rather than three in an industrial accident.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 21, 2019

... for all its failings as a coherent narrative, it's a far more satisfying theatergoing experience than the last two chapters, if only because of how patently ridiculous the final product is.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jul 17, 2019

Treats sexual kink with all the depth of a snickering middle-schooler who just discovered the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, but at least this one bothers to be fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 3, 2019

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Fifty Shades Freed Review: Delightfully Absurd Trilogy Goes Out with a Bang

By Jordan Hoffman

Image may contain Human Person Dating and Make Out

I experienced some weird moments of extreme empathy with Anastasia Steele ( Dakota Johnson ) during Fifty Shades Freed —and no, I don’t mean that in any kinky dom-sub way. I was simply as overwhelmed by the strangeness of her tale as she was.

The first scene in director James Foley’s conclusion (climax?) to the E. L. James, saga is of Anastasia’s wedding, so clearly, she said “yes” to Christian Grey’s ( Jamie Dornan ) proposal at the end of the last one. It’s a nice looking affair, so figure that even with Grey Money—the kind where you snap your fingers and the world immediately contorts to your wishes—there had to be time to book the hall, find a caterer, hire the right calligrapher for the invitations. The point I’m making is that even though the Grey-Steele romance has been a whirlwind since Ana literally stumbled into Christian’s office (then later his red dungeon, and, finally, his heart), it’s just inconceivable that she never found out before that he has his own jet.

“This is yours?” she asks as he carries her over the threshold in Fifty Shades Freed. “No—ours,” he answers. Smooth talker.

Later, after their honeymoon in Paris and the Riviera—where Ana fights for her right to go topless at the beach!—the pair is enjoying a quiet dinner at home when they first broach the topic of having children. We’re to believe that a relationship that began with a contract of dos and don’ts specific enough for a line item on anal fisting never got around to “hey, whatcha think about kids?”

The disorientation the characters feel is mirrored by the audience, at least the ones that never read the books. There’s some guy chasing Ana? Oh, yeah, I kinda remember that. Wait, what’s this talk about a helicopter crash? Who are all these blonde women again? Doesn’t Kim Basinger figure in somehow? Fifty Shades Freed, more so than the other two entries in this absurd yet undeniably enjoyable trilogy, has almost no narrative drive until the last 30 minutes. The film is more of a victory lap for those dedicated viewers who really wanted to see Ana and Christian in marriage. They wear nice clothing; they screw; they buy stuff; they take another trip; and they deal with something that confronts every newlywed couple: kidnapping attempts. The ephemeral nature of these movies, whose flimsy plots barely reach the legal definition of feature films, recede until we’re left with what’s essential: titter-worthy sex scenes and luxury goods.

I can’t for the life of me explain why the only architect in Seattle looks like a Victoria’s Secret model ( Arielle Kebbel ) and also shows up in Aspen when the rest of the film’s characters do, nor could I ever clarify why a catty consultation with her sends Ana into a 007-esque car chase. But I do know that the Audi R8 look both elegant and sporty, especially as Dakota Johnson bites her lower lip and takes it on sharp turns.

Jack Hyde (these names!) was Ana’s old boss, and now the Princeton-educated book editor has turned into a psychotic master criminal. Though Christian Grey is rich enough to buy the publishing house where Ana has been given another unearned promotion, he can’t figure out how to hire capable security. Hyde ( Eric Johnson ) outwits Grey’s goons multiple times, causing much consternation.

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This leads to plenty of running around and even some gunplay, but that’s not really what Fifty Shades is all about. The real question is, can Christian and Ana’s romance grow into something mature while they still remain them ? Is there room for both responsibility and butt-plugs in this crazy world?

As with most things, the answer is, “with enough money, sure.” And that’s why this franchise remains a much-needed escapism release valve. It’s still cathartic and therapeutic to sit in the dark and dream a pure, selfish, and pleasantly photographed dream, where the endless material pampering (Christian is a sentient slab of abdominal muscles with a limitless black card) is the real perversion.

It’s hard to find compliments for Jamie Dornan beyond “very athletic”—but from start to finish, one can’t give Johnson enough credit for making these asinine movies work as well as they do. Her performance is about more than just the girl next door shedding her inhibitions for another kinky act, including, this time, one involving Ben & Jerry’s; you can see her making smart acting choices at every turn, somehow taking the gobbledygook of this preposterous story and humanizing it. Get her the right script, and she’ll be unstoppable.

But for now, Johnson—or Ana, at least—is in her happy place, on her knees next to Jamie Dornan and his riding crop. This final film ties (handcuffs?) everything up nicely, but it certainly is the weakest of the three; it lacks the shock of the first and bona fide insanity of the second. But for an enterprise so suspect (remember, this all spawned from Twilight fan fiction), it nevertheless leaves its mark. I went into this trilogy with my safe word ready, but I never had to use it.

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Review: Finally, the Audience Is ‘Fifty Shades Freed’

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Feb. 8, 2018

Previously on “One Bruise at a Time” (a.k.a. the first two “Fifty Shades” outings ): Ana and Christian (Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan), our slap-and-tickle surrogates, bonded through bondage and a shared affection for flattering lighting. Now, with “Fifty Shades Freed,” we’ve reached what the publicity notes are pleased to call “the climactic chapter” of this titillation trilogy based on the heavy-breathing novels of E.L. James. If another sequel shows up, though, I’m going to have to use my safe word.

Layering a damp-squib thriller subplot beneath what appears to be an ad campaign for the one-percent lifestyle, the returning director and screenwriter (James Foley and Niall Leonard) test the newly married couple with an inconvenient pregnancy and an unconvincing car chase. There’s an out-of-left-field abduction and a marital tiff over email addresses; but these narrative fragments, lazily tossed together alongside a neglected supporting cast, are no more than a flimsy causeway connecting bonking sessions.

Invariably accompanied by wailing makeout music and sometimes a dairy product, these function simultaneously as the movie’s raison d’être and its creamy topping. Yet with the couple’s power dynamic seemingly settled — he’s a controlling chauvinist, she’s mostly fine with that — the rods and restraints are no longer necessary negotiating tools. Now, it’s just married sex, albeit more rippling and racy than most.

As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.

Rated R for thongs and handcuffs and guns, oh my! Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

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Entertainment
<i>Fifty Shades Freed</i> Is a Pleasure. Just Don’t Call It a Guilty One

Fifty Shades Freed Is a Pleasure. Just Don’t Call It a Guilty One

W omen’s desire is a mysterious, feral thing, and if you think you’ve got it figured out because you’ve looked at a few Georgia O’Keeffe paintings, you’re not even close. No wonder most men, and plenty of women, would rather not scrutinize either the success or the content of E.L. James ‘ expansively steamy Fifty Shades novels and the movies adapted from them, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and, now, Fifty Shades Freed (running time 2 hours). It’s easier to laugh at these deliriously popular Fifty Shades books and movies than to tangle with what’s actually in them and with what they might mean to an audience. Plus, in the midst of our roaring cultural conversation about sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace, the elusive intricacy of what makes women tick is probably the last subject any of us wants to talk about. Which is exactly why now is the time to talk about it.

In Fifty Shades Freed , released in the U.S. on Feb. 9, Dakota Johnson returns as Anastasia Steele, the once prim but now sexually adventurous heroine introduced in Fifty Shades of Grey . In that movie, she was a recent college grad drawn into a somewhat unorthodox sexual relationship with 27-year-old Seattle billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). Her initiation into Grey’s brand of BDSM kink happens in his “playroom,” a red-velvet-festooned bachelor lair kitted out with an array of restraints and dainty, rather harmless-looking riding crops. Although it doesn’t happen overnight, Anastasia progresses from timid but mildly curious mouseburger to self-assured, table-turning tigress. Meanwhile, the dizzying head game played out between these tentative lovers is familiar to just about any straight woman or gay man who has dated in the past, say, 2,000 years: Grey, though drawn to Anastasia, is emotionally generous one minute and stonily withholding the next. Her love can tame him, heal him! She’s special that way.

The Greys will see you now. #FiftyShadesFreed is NOW PLAYING. Get tickets: https://t.co/PItwn4ZJ0R pic.twitter.com/nUGoFz3Gut — Fifty Shades Freed (@FiftyShades) February 9, 2018

That dynamic plays out over and over–and over–in the Fifty Shades trilogy. But the pattern is part of the fun: as Prince said, there’s joy in repetition. Anastasia breaks with Grey at the end of the first film, when his sadistic impulses unreel a bit too far for her taste, and the two reconcile in Fifty Shades Darker . By this point, their relationship has become a more manageable pie chart of plain-vanilla and debauched sex, and they’ve gotten much better at talking. Most significant, Anastasia has learned to communicate exactly what she wants: I like it like this, not like that. Back off. Come closer.

Fifty Shades Freed opens with a comically exaggerated Modern Bride fantasy of a luxurious but intimate wedding followed by a no-expenses-spared honeymoon. (In one of the Fifty Shades Freed ‘s swooniest howlers, the newlyweds canoodle as the Eiffel Tower looms approvingly in the background.) Anastasia has married into money, but she’s also set on building her career as a book editor. And Grey’s need for control is weakness, not strength, and Anastasia knows it. Tellingly, her going-away outfit, a sleek eggshell pantsuit, is more impressive than her ho-hum-pretty wedding dress. A wedding dress is a goal, an end in itself, but a pantsuit is the future: it’s what a woman wears when she’s going places.

In Fifty Shades Freed there is also, of course, sex that is alternately steamy and ridiculous, and sometimes both at once. Fifty Shades Freed is ridiculous–luxuriously so. That doesn’t make it bad, no matter what professional critics–most of whom savaged the two earlier films–are likely to tell you. Fifty Shades Freed is what many people would call, in an attempt to prove that they know a good movie when they see one, a “guilty pleasure,” though I rail against that idea in principle. Nothing that brings pleasure ought to be reflexively entwined with guilt. Besides, movies that critics–or even our friends–loftily decree “bad” are actually often “good” in ways that have little to do with aesthetics or even taste. Maybe there’s clunky dialogue or thin characters or sex that would be silly if you tried to re-enact it in real life. But occasionally a movie just has the juice, some indefinable energy that even a perfectly crafted film can lack.

There’s another dynamic at work here. When movies are targeted toward women, as the Fifty Shades ones are, the chance that they will be dismissed increases exponentially, especially when so many critics happen to be men. That’s nothing new, and professional critics aren’t the only ones who scoff. Plenty of regular guys know a “chick flick” when they see one, though it goes without saying that some men love them, secretly or otherwise.

And women aren’t obligated to like them or respond to them, though it may be easier for us to read between the lines of their popularity. There’s a long, proud tradition of Hollywood films known, not always respectfully, as “women’s pictures,” movies with female protagonists who suffer hardships, make sacrifices and sometimes find unexpected joy and freedom. The women’s-picture umbrella is wide, covering 1940s triumph-over-adversity melodramas like Mildred Pierce ; vivid, tear-soaked 1950s spectacles like Written on the Wind ; and 1980s terminal-illness weepers like Terms of Endearment . Serious film scholars recognize, rightly, the artistry of some of these pictures. But the woman’s film, broadly speaking, has always been a potential target of derision. “What more damning comment on the relations between men and women in America than the very notion of something called the ‘woman’s film’?” the film critic and historian Molly Haskell wrote in her classic 1974 study From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies . “And what more telling sign of critical and sexual priorities than the low caste it has among the highbrows? Held at arm’s length it is, indeed, the untouchable of film genres.”

The Fifty Shades movies, replete with their fantasies of self-actualization and sexual experimentation and discovery, at least partially fit the profile of traditional women’s pictures. But they’re also a revival of another genre that has all but disappeared from Hollywood: the erotic thriller. The 1980s and ’90s were a golden age of movie nudity: think of the feverish carnality of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat , or Sharon Stone’s sultry brashness in Basic Instinct . Male nudity is more common in mainstream movies today than it was then. But female nudity has become practically extinct in Hollywood films: we still see it, but for the most part only in independent and foreign films. In the ’80s and ’90s you could argue, and many did, that movie nudity was generally gratuitous and degrading to women. But the little female nudity we see in mainstream films today is worse: it’s reserved largely for broad, jokey comedies like the 2016 blockbuster Deadpool , in which Morena Baccarin nearly stops the show in a sex-scene montage spanning nearly every holiday of the calendar.

That scene is too good-natured to offend any sensible person, but you’d hardly call it erotic. Even more depressingly, it’s symbolic of an increasingly puerile approach to movie sex. Today’s sex scenes, and the semi-nudity they feature, are rarely languorous or sensual. Instead, sex is generally presented as something best rushed through, Energizer Bunny–style, to limit the risk of embarrassment or remorse, or even the possibility of actual pleasure. In real life and in the best movies, a woman’s naked body has an innate elegance; it looks less dignified when it’s obscured by lingerie or a low-cut top, as we so often see in movies today. Those little bits of cloth speak less of modesty than of a perfunctory impulse to cover up, as if a woman’s nakedness could be nothing but an invitation to shame.

Movie nudity is so rare today that it makes what Dakota Johnson does, in all three Fifty Shades movies, that much more remarkable. She takes Anastasia seriously while retaining a sense of humor about herself. In a scene where Grey’s tongue follows the length of Anastasia’s leg, from ankle to wherever, Anastasia gives in to the moment, her neck arched in glorious silhouette. Johnson has a sense of Anastasia not just as part of a pristinely arranged tableau but also as a sensualist, with all the attendant nerve endings and complex emotions that that implies. Johnson is fearless about stripping bare, but her bold flirtiness is inextricable from her dignity: the sauciness of her mother Melanie Griffith and the marble-cool poise of her grandmother, Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren, merge in her.

The stolidly handsome Dornan, on the other hand, is something of a dud. But even that works in the movies’ favor: all eyes are on Anastasia’s pleasure. Fifty Shades Freed ‘s director, James Foley, and cinematographer, John Schwartzman, keep the movie’s sex scenes elegant and sleek, but not airless. This is a case where a woman’s nudity is presented for women’s delectation, not men’s. In her most euphoric moments, Anastasia looks how, if we’re lucky, some of us at times feel.

In that sense, Anastasia shares her youth and beauty even with those who are no longer young or youthfully beautiful. The current sexual-harassment firestorm has brought with it a clash between younger women and older feminists. Younger women perceive the message of older women as “You should have to put up with the same agonies we did.” Older women just want the younger ones to recognize that sexual impulses aren’t fully tamable beasts: civilization depends on our control of them, but they will always present dangers that demand our caution and awareness.

The signals between young and old have been crossed. We can only hope good faith will win out. But maybe Anastasia stands for everything second-wave feminists want for their young counterparts, at least in bed. Those women availed themselves of the sexual freedom afforded by the pill but they still had to deal with crappy, chauvinistic guys, not to mention episodes of uncomfortable, often regrettable sex in muddy fields and VW buses. Anastasia, meanwhile, knows when to say no, and when to walk away. She has set the terms of her own sexual bliss, as victor not victim. And, gorgeously, she can laugh about it all. Why shouldn’t it be our pleasure to laugh along with her?

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Film Review: ‘Fifty Shades Freed’

Married life might change many people for the better, but it has a slightly dulling effect on this expensively appointed finale to E.L. James's erotic trilogy.

By Guy Lodge

Film Critic

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Every word is a safe one in “ Fifty Shades Freed ,” a Swarovski-dipped series closer that takes no chances, and spares no luxury expense, in giving Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey the dream wedding and nightmare honeymoon period their fans have been anticipating for years. Departing only incidentally from E.L. James’s trashy tome, and making up for any short cuts with extra set dressing, this is brochure cinema of the most profuse order, selling its audience more on a lifestyle than on any of the lives inside it. What began, however glossily, as an ambiguity-laced power struggle between two people from separate social and sexual worlds has devolved into a far less intriguing victory lap for an exquisite couple that wants, and can afford, most of the same things — at least until the pesky matter of baby-making gets in the way.

Even as it administered a patchouli-scented dose of fan service to James’s hungry readership, 2016’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” was a brittle, brisk surprise, refashioning the book’s lilac prose into a warped romantic comedy of personal boundaries, with S&M as the bargaining currency between Anastasia and Christian — played by Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan with a wary, push-pull dynamic. When director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Kelly Marcel made way, respectively, for James Foley and James’s husband Niall Leonard for “Fifty Shades Darker,” the result unsurprisingly hewed closer to the author’s original gushing vision, with sexual politics that were less thorny and, for all the steam generated on screen, more conservatively patriarchal.

Interesting as it would have been to see a third creative team take the finale up yet another tonal alley, Foley and Leonard unsurprisingly keep “Freed” bound to its source. With Mrs. Grey now mostly in her husband’s gilded grasp, the series’ former tart strain of battle-of-the-sexes comedy has bled almost entirely out of the enterprise, while even our heroine’s sporadic moments of defiance don’t stray far from a plush wish-fulfilment agenda.

But oh, what pretty wishes! And what princely fulfilment! “Fifty Shades Freed” begins where most romances of its ilk would reasonably end: with rich, dewy nuptials fit for a Vanity Fair spread. Quavering vows are exchanged against a wall of antique-blush roses; John Schwartzman’s camera gorges in crystalline close-up on every last silver cufflink and shred of Chantilly lace.

Taking the film on its own material terms, there’s a perverse frisson of pleasure — of sweet, egregiously unequal justice — to be had in watching two people this immaculately beautiful finally unite in quite such accordingly beautiful fashion, and it’s here where James (once more acting as producer) and the filmmakers have us right where they want us. “You own this?” Anastasia asks, gawping at the private jet waiting to whisk them off on a Côte d’Azur honeymoon. “ We own this,” her husband smirks in reply, as the film practically pauses for our applause, and maybe even a rosewater tear, at the shared privilege of it all. How far they’ve come.

What this spectacle doesn’t leave us, however, is much road for this relationship to travel in the happy couple’s souped-up, product-placed Audi speedster. James’s trilogy may consume over 1,600 pages of type, but it’s hard to shake the feeling from an early point in “Fifty Shades Freed” (the series’ shortest entry at a light, padded 105 minutes) that perhaps there weren’t quite three films in it. As Anastasia and Christian argue back and forth with only minor variations over admittedly major points of contention — his possessive nature infringing on her charmed career, their disagreement over when to start a family, whether she should remove her bikini top on the beach or not — Leonard’s lumpen script zeroes in on a tinny thriller subplot, centered on the violent, mysteriously vengeful stalking of Anastasia’s smarmy ex-boss Hyde (Eric Johnson) as the main attraction.

This is the terrain for which Foley, at his best a slinky genre stylist with a tobacco-acrid edge, was presumably brought on board, and he gives it a bit of vim: A luxury-vehicle car chase, screeching and weaving at arrogant speed along the highways of Seattle, is a set piece that rattles in the mind longer and louder than the who and why of it all. He can’t do much, however, to juice up a thin, illogical abduction climax that at least gives an admittedly gagged dramatic function to pop star Rita Ora — little-used but zappily charismatic as Christian’s sister Mia, the only member of this marble-clad family you’d conceivably want to hang with for reasons other than sheer monetary osmosis. In a series so obsessively dazzled by its central couple that even actors like Marcia Gay Harden and Jennifer Ehle are reduced to subservient stick figures in their orbit, that’s an accomplishment.

The trouble with this tunnel vision is that, by round three, there’s nothing left to discover in Anastasia and Christian — characters who, even at their most engaging, weren’t exactly Chekhovian to begin with. With the root of his sadism, her masochism and the mood music their combined issues make together all adequately explored, we’re left mostly rehashing old tensions that, with familiarity, have gone a little slack.

Johnson, so wonderful in the first film, made a game fist of her character’s more capricious conception in the second. This time, her inherent likeability as a performer is all that’s keeping Anastasia, a notionally independent career woman who veers between seething assertiveness and spineless compliance at the script’s will, from sliding off the screen entirely. The extent of Christian’s development, meanwhile, is summed up by the film’s most inadvertently amusing line, delivered by yet another peripheral admirer in his employ: “That GQ profile on you? I love what you’re doing in Africa.” (Dornan even gets a chance to croon Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” at the piano, just to prove just what an awakened heart beats beneath all that bespoke pewter-colored tailoring.)

And what of the sex? Perhaps the lone surprise of “Fifty Shades Freed” is just how incidental its erotica has become: There’s no shortage here of lightly spiced bump and grind, staged and shot with salted-caramel smoothness, with nothing more than Johnson’s nipples or a fleeting brush of Dornan’s pubic hedge to prickle delicate sensibilities. But where the first film’s sex scenes, however tame in the grand scheme of things, were integral to setting the terms and tone of the relationship under scrutiny, by this point they’re mostly just (very) attractive digressions, while the once-tremulously mentioned Red Room of Pain has become merely another indulgent facility at Casa Grey, not to mention a handy spare bedroom in the event of a soon-resolved marital squabble. It’ll be a nursery before you know it.

Indeed, a sex-free, PG-13 version of “Freed” could be cut without shedding a second of narrative coherence, such as it is; one could ask what the point of that would be, though similar queries might be leveled at the film as it stands. Intentionally or otherwise, however, perhaps there’s a rueful truth to the gradual dwindling of the films’ kink levels: Sex is just a thing Anastasia and Christian do now, as it is for many a married couple until, in some cases, it eventually isn’t even that any more.

Finally, the film closes with a fat French kiss to its fans: a creamy montage of memorable moments from the whole series — mostly, let it be said, from the first two films — scored to a light remix of “Love Me Like You Do,” Ellie Goulding’s soaring pop belter from “Fifty Shades of Grey.” (The new film’s theme, a comparatively generic number by Ora and Liam Payne, isn’t given quite such pride of place.) If that highlight reel is fresher and more vivid than the agreeably silly cashmere diversion that precedes it, it’s hard to begrudge the happy, horny couple a pleasantly boring life together. (Anti-capitalists can begrudge them everything else, but that’s another story.)

Is “Fifty Shades Freed” a wily takedown of married bliss, or at least an acknowledgement that it makes the wildest among us a shade less exciting? Almost certainly not, to go by the contented sighs and cheers that greeted the finale’s dreamily domestic flash-forward at its premiere. Still, it’s fun to imagine this ritzy, ultimately rule-abiding film being at least that provocative.

Reviewed at Salle Pleyel, Paris, Feb. 6, 2018.

Production: A Universal Pictures presentation of a Michael De Luca production in association with Perfect World Pictures. Producers: Michael De Luca, E.L. James, Dana Brunetti, Marcus Viscidi.
Crew: Director: James Foley. Screenplay: Niall Leonard, adapted from the novel by E.L. James. Camera (color, widescreen): John Schwartzman. Editors: Richard Francis-Bruce, Debra Neil-Fisher. Music: Danny Elfman.
With: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan , Eric Johnson, Rita Ora, Luke Grimes, Victor Rasuk, Jennifer Ehle, Marcia Gay Harden, Eloise Mumford, Max Martini, Arielle Kebbel, Brant Daugherty, Amy Price-Francis, Tyler Hoechlin.

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Fifty shades freed, common sense media reviewers.

Third and final movie has more bland sex, even less plot.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The strongest message is that marriages/romantic r

Ana is more outspoken than in the past when it com

Similar violence levels as in the last movie. Ther

Many long, graphic sex scenes that show everything

Several uses of "f--k," "ass,"

Audi, Apple products (MacBook, iPhone, etc.), Cadi

Adults drink wine, beer, and cocktails at various

Positive Messages

The strongest message is that marriages/romantic relationships require a partnership between equals. Although chemistry/attraction is important, it's also essential that the people involved work together to compromise and support each other. Christian's story also encourages dealing with the difficult/disturbing aspects of your past and moving forward.

Positive Role Models

Ana is more outspoken than in the past when it comes to being an equal in her marriage. She's now more secure in herself and sure of what she wants, both out of marriage and in her career. She reminds Christian that marriage is about compromise, trust, and working through problems. Christian is still slightly controlling and jumps to jealous conclusions, but he ultimately listens to and respects Anastasia. Ana and Christian's close friends/family are supportive.

Violence & Scariness

Similar violence levels as in the last movie. There's gun and knife violence: An intruder holds Anastasia at knife point, and a man kidnaps a woman and holds her hostage, bound and gagged. A man forcefully slaps and kicks a woman to the point of unconsciousness. A character shoots another. Bodyguards point their guns at an attacker and apprehend him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Many long, graphic sex scenes that show everything other than complete full-frontal nudity (i.e., bare breasts, lots of close-ups of nipples, shots of buttocks, and also occasional glimpses of pubic hair). These explicit scenes portray consensual light bondage and submission/domination scenarios, as well as oral sex and the use of various sex/novelty toys/aides. Definitely more sex scenes this time than in the first movie; possibly more than in the last one, too.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," "ass," "a--hole," "s--t," "bulls--t," "d--k," "hell," "goddamn," "Jesus Christ," and "my God" (as exclamations), plus some "dirty talk."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Audi, Apple products (MacBook, iPhone, etc.), Cadillac Escalade, Cartier ring, some outerwear (North Face, Patagonia).

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink wine, beer, and cocktails at various receptions, dinners, and events. Kate and Ana drink martini after martini to the point that one of them gets drunk and needs to be driven home. Christian gets drunk offscreen and then returns home barely able to walk straight.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Fifty Shades Freed is the final installment in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, movies based on E.L. James' best-selling erotic romance novels originally written as Twilight fan fiction. Like the other two movies, it's an erotic drama with more bedroom action than pretty much anything else. Like Twilight's Breaking Dawn , Fifty Shades Freed starts with the main characters' wedding and then follows the sex-fueled newlyweds as they navigate external pressures -- but mostly just find ways to have sex anywhere they go. There are many explicit sex scenes, including extreme close-up shots of naked breasts and buttocks and glimpses of pubic hair -- as well as multiple sexual accessories and toys. The language is also strong, with "f--k," "s--t," and other words used frequently. Characters also drink often (appearing drunk in a couple of scenes), and there's lots of brand/product placement, especially luxury cars (Audi in particular) and electronics. Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (23)
Kids say (16)

Based on 23 parent reviews

SO MANY BAD MESSAGES!!!!

What's the story.

FIFTY SHADES FREED begins with the wedding of Anastasia Steele ( Dakota Johnson ) and Christian Grey ( Jamie Dornan ), who immediately rush off to their luxurious honeymoon on a private plane. After sightseeing and making love around the world, the new Mr. and Mrs. Grey are forced to return to Seattle when Christian is told that an arsonist set fire to his company's server room. The perpetrator is Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), Ana's former boss and attacker. After Jack is arrested for the fire, the Greys continue their life as newlyweds: Ana is promoted to a position that even she's not sure she deserves, and Christian mopes about Ana's commitment to her work. Ana calls Christian out when he lapses back into controlling possessiveness. They also buy a fixer-upper mansion, travel with friends, have a lot of sex, and then deal with Jack again.

Is It Any Good?

Although Johnson tries to liven up the wooden dialogue, this third and final installment is still a plot-free excuse to show the chemistry-less Greys having lots of sex in beautiful locales. Dornan, who's a decent actor in non-Fifty Shades projects -- particularly the gritty crime drama The Fall -- finally looks comfortable in his role, but Christian is still a deeply flawed, unlikable, mostly undeveloped character. The filmmakers tell but don't show him dealing with his past. He's just a walking piece of wish fulfillment, not a fully fleshed-out human character. And let's not even mention the ridiculous way in which Anastasia is promoted (due to nepotism) at work. The fact that Christian feels free to barge into an important meeting she's having with a star author to demand that she explain why she didn't immediately change her email address from "Ana Steele" to "Ana Grey" is perhaps one of the worst marital conversations ever portrayed on the big screen.

What makes this movie and Fifty Shades Darker even bigger disappointments than the original is that there's basically no plot. Like a more polished, big-budget version of late-night cable erotica, Fifty Shades Freed is pretty much just a series of artfully shot sex scenes (director James Foley loves to zoom in on Johnson's breasts) separated by the thinnest of narrative structures and poorly executed characterization. By the time Ana's unsurprising pregnancy enters the picture, it's that much more obvious that this movie isn't so much a climax but an anticlimax. But if all you're craving is a movie with plenty of graphic love scenes and luxe interiors, this is a fine pick.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how sex is depicted in Fifty Shades Freed . Is Ana and Christian's marriage/relationship healthy? Parents, talk to your teens about your own values regarding sex and relationships.

Why do you think the Fifty Shades books and movies are popular? Is it an appropriate saga for teens? The author began her story as Twilight fan fiction; can you recognize traces of Edward and Bella in these characters?

Which, if any, of the characters are role models ? Are they sympathetic? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

In theaters : February 9, 2018
On DVD or streaming : May 8, 2018
Cast : Dakota Johnson , Jamie Dornan , Eric Johnson
Director : James Foley
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Romance
Topics : Book Characters
Run time : 101 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong sexual content, nudity, and language
Last updated : May 18, 2023

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Fifty Shades Freed (2018)

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Fifty Shades Freed Review

The fifty shades trilogy ends exactly as it began: trying to convince you that it’s important..

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Fifty Shades Freed - like the two films before it - seems desperate to convince somebody, even itself, that the story it’s telling is actually worth telling. But methinks the movie doth protest too much. When all is said and done, what was said was badly written and what was done wasn’t very interesting. Fifty Shades Freed concludes the trilogy as it began, with a romance you can’t believe in, endless montages of affluence, lousy dialogue, weak plotting, and - admittedly - a heck of a lot of sex.

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Movie Review: Fifty Shades Freed (2018)

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--> February 14, 2018

And with that, the war on Valentine’s Day is over.

It took two films, but finally Christian (Jamie Dornan, “ Anthropoid ”) shows off the smarts they said made him capable of running a company: Using just one ring rather than many cables to bind his love, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson, “ How to Be Single ”). Fifty Shades Freed opens with Ms. Steele blooming into Mrs. Grey — or, more precisely, sub wife to her dom man. For their honeymoon, they bounce to Europe, first Paris and then Monaco — a.k.a. Boob Land, as Anastasia calls it. Meanwhile, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson, “Orphan Black” TV series) returns, mining a wallop of data for revenge and stuff in the middle of the Greys’ session of cuffed consummation on Riviera waters.

Seems like the “Fifty Shades” series finally knows the meaning of “stakes.” Wait, that doesn’t sound or spell like “sex,” and so it will be treated with as much substance as a half-night stand. That exclusive obsession with and of the flesh, hollow as it is, elevates E.L. James’ “writing” into the phenomenon we know today, and that’s something scribe Niall Leonard immaculately translates to the screen adaptations. It’s tortuous. Variation occasionally comes in the form of Christian’s, or Ana’s, irresponsibility to bear the fruits marriage may sow, but Leonard builds them with great disinterest, zipping by them like they weren’t there and making fornication the plot’s backbone. In retrospect, that’s the writer’s intention and voice in which no one will deny. And so the cheapening, even smearing, of a peculiar kind of romance is at its most rampant, and the want for proper dialogue and plot points has finally become make-believe.

It’s clear Johnson and Dornan are tired. Can we blame them, really, upon knowing the story, as it goes on, is in essence less about them and more about their next bedroom trick? Kudos, still, for the production to get Audi and Ben & Jerry’s to go along with the ride, pun unintended. So visible is the leads’ ennui from — or most of their existence throughout the trilogy — trapped in a single note of either nearing climax or causing one. Semi-understandably, the “Fifty Shades” series is about having fantasies satisfied, but all ring false when one minute after another until the end is just that. For three films. And now Christian knows how to sing, too! Imagine a dream where the elements within keep lunging at you with “You can see me now because you’re sleeping.” At least Dornan gets to play drunkard at one point, which is genuinely amusing. Johnson continues to imbue Anastasia with that about-to-do-an-eye-roll trait, again being the perfect audience surrogate. These aren’t average actors — Dornan, like Chris Hemsworth, knows funny (see his parody with James Corden); Johnson can be heartrending when her character is crafted like a human being (see “ Black Mass ”). They’re free to go now, and that’s a cause worth celebrating.

Like its two predecessors, the style-guide look of Fifty Shades Freed is the only thing not set out punish, test, or corrupt our inner goodness. There’s no trouncing the refined garbs and modish sets of “ Fifty Shades of Grey ,” but Shay Cunliffe’s costumes and Nelson Coates’ production design do fleetingly liven the sterile atmosphere. That said, a more inspired method to get the film’s look for yourself and your abode is to read up GQ or Cosmopolitan. Better writing lives there, as well as more tricks to give intimacy some color — in other words, love less like Greys do.

Tagged: love , novel adaptation , sequel , sex , wedding

Graduated from the University of Houston. Love writing about culture and film. Life at the moment directed by Sam Mendes. Could use more friends and cinephiles on Facebook or Twitter .

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Fifty Shades Freed Review

Fifty Shades Freed ends the trilogy by at least partially laughing along with the audience at how impotent this lame love story is.

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Some franchises end with grace and humility, finding a resolution to their characters’ shared journey that leaves fans satisfied that they even took those first steps with them; others overstay their welcome and limp across a finish line after a point at which no one cares anymore; and then there’s Fifty Shades Freed , the final film in the infamous (and maybe beloved?) Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. This film neither ends with a bang or a whimper—although there is plenty of both such things onscreen. More simply, and like all the narrative threads told across three films, it just unspools with the elegance of a tangled rope that won’t unknot, yet is still happy to wallow on its red leather couch, ignorant to all the exciting and unused tools at its disposal.

But at least for Fifty Shades Freed , this film is aware of its disposability, and for the first time in three installments, it embraces its ridiculousness and silliness. So in the end, maybe this really is the series’ grace note?

After director Sam Taylor-Johnson tried and failed to turn a cultural punchline into an epic love story in the first film, and helmer James Foley and screenwriter Niall Leonard presented a ghastly second movie, Fifty Shades Freed is the most at home in its own skin. It’s aware that audiences are going to snicker at its pronouncements of romance, or at the idea that Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey has a habit of being an uber-possessive douchebag, and it is willing to poke fun at that. The story is still beige wish fulfillment that is absolutely impotent at creating tension or a rising sense of stakes, yet it still tries to offer a fun night out with what little it has to work with.

Right from the start, the film makes no bones about why we’re all here. Before the opening credits are even over, Christian and Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) have stumbled through their wedding vows and are already off on a romantic honeymoon in Paris and the South of France. They’re also in a bedroom completely devoid of toys—at least until she disobeys him about not covering up at a chic nude beach. Weddings are nice, but it’s in the confines of nickel plated handcuffs that Fifty Shades imagines romance.

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Eventually the newlyweds make it back home to Seattle, but they never stop cruising. When they return, Ana has discovered she received a promotion while gone, and Christian then whisks her away from work twice throughout the week to show her the perfect mansion he’s bought and then to spend a long weekend in Aspen, complete with bathtubs overlooking the scenery and late night kitchen rendezvous. Sprinkled throughout these steamy travelogues, there is some humorously inept drama about Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson) stalking Christian and Ana, convinced Christian owes him for trapping him inside his daytime soap opera motivations, and then Christian is an outright asshole in how he reacts to Ana revealing she’s pregnant. “I don’t want to share you,” he howls before leaving to go get drunk.

But really the point is to either lust or laugh at when they enter the couple’s shared Red Room of Pain. Frequently. One shudders at imagining what their nursery décor is going to soon be.

Fifty Shades Freed is every bit as devoid of amour and allure as its predecessors. This is a series that considers comparing girlfriends to a photo of your dead mother a form of foreplay, and menacing demands of subservience a game of endearing courtship. Such stilted awkwardness remains present in Foley and Leonard’s final rendering of this lame love story too.

At certain points Christian barges into Anastasia’s place of work to command her to change her name from Ms. Steele to Mrs. Grey at the office, and his reaction to discovering she is pregnant should be enough to cause most people to go running for the hills—or at least the Bugatti. However, Fifty Shades knowingly tweaks the absurdity this time, allowing the film to be in on the joke during the waves of derisive laughter.

When her bodyguards pin down the first of her inept stalkers in this film, they realize they have nothing to tie him up with until Anastasia quickly blushes, “We do.” Dornan’s Grey is still creepily controlling, but the film now concedes there is something vaguely humorous about him intensely glaring at Ana while she sleeps, silently contemplating new punishments for her disobedience. Unlike his Edward Cullen forebear, Grey’s final movie can accept that he’s a monster.

As such, any moment that allows Johnson and Dornan to flash some eye-rolls at the material is relieving, because the duo’s chemistry maintains a lukewarm simmer. There is, however, a familiarity at this point when they attempt to make something approximating “love;” there’s even a sense of camaraderie, if not companionship. It’s almost a silent prayer between them that, God willing, they’ll get through this thing together.

The movie is at the end of the day a wish fulfillment fantasy, and as the couple jet around the world, to either Europe or Colorado, they do so with bottles of champagne always open or with a nice Mercedes waiting for them upon their arrival. Even being stalked by a mysterious SUV means they get to speed and then speed up to a post-escape tryst in a parking lot.

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Foley tries to make the sex scenes less repetitive (not that he succeeds) with some crosscuts between punishment and morning after revelry here, or some ice cream-smeared foreplay there. Yet when this reviewer is left to wonder whether Ben & Jerry’s would want to pay for that kind of product placement, it likely is not having the intended effect. (Seriously though, was there a discussion of should they be lathering each other in “Chunky Monkey” or “The Tonight Dough?”)

But I and most of my critical peers are not the intended audience. As the movie unfurled its spoils across our screen, there were echoes of contemptuous laughter throughout the theater—albeit less so than with the previous film. But nothing we write is going to stop its intended audience from seeing or even enjoying this guilty gruesomeness.

Out there is an audience ready to sincerely embrace the sight of Jamie Dornan badly crooning mid-2000s pop ballads on a piano as something approaching tender artfulness. And for everyone else there is ice cream sex. At the end of the day, Fifty Shades of Grey is over, and it actually ends in this film on a shockingly genuine sweet note of kink and love. If nothing else, it was here as a major part of our culture, and totally recast its inspiration, Twilight , into the new role of not being the worst thing to come out of popular fiction. So mazel tov, Ana and Christian. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

1.5 out of 5

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

Fifty Shades Freed Review

It's the franchise that picked up where Twilight left off. A series of wildly successful books, the Fifty Shades trilogy had made a name for itself as a best-selling bodice ripper that was turned into one of the least sexy franchises in film history. And sure enough, Fifty Shades Freed's arrival heralds another brooding romance that tries to do something more adventurous with its last act. And yet, much like a misguided lover trying to spice things up, without a clue about what they're doing, this flick disappoints more than it titillates.

After a whirlwind courtship, Anastasia Steele ( Dakota Johnson ) and Christian Grey ( Jamie Dornan ) are finally married. Their relationship woes aren't totally past them, as Ana's growing rebellious streak is giving her new husband a hard time. To make matters worse, the scorned and fired Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson) has been engineering his final revenge against the happy couple, swearing that they "owe him a life." Whatever that means.

If Fifty Shades Freed had gone the way of the classic USA Network erotic thriller, it would have at least been a trashy delight to enjoy. And for a while, that's exactly where you think this third installment will finally go, after two films of teasing a darker plot at hand. Unfortunately, this menacing thread is only barely featured in the first two acts of the film, with a rushed third act climax that finally sees Jack's revenge become an actual threat. Even with a kidnapping and ransom demand in play, this film can't muster any thrills.

What's the rest of Fifty Shades Freed made up of, you might be asking? Well, if you're a fan of the tamest BDSM sex, and a soundtrack that can't stop throwing in mid-tempo pop tracks into its already fast-paced playlist, then you're in luck. Oh, spoiler alert, Anastasia and Christian actually get married in this movie! Oh don't worry if you forget their absurdly dull wedding from the opening of the film, as there's still plenty of "banter" between the happy couple that reminds us that yes, there was a wedding.

Additionally, there are moments between Fifty Shades Freed's main couple that really highlight the unhealthy nature of their relationship. In one particular instance, Anastasia and Christian are having dinner, and getting into a fight over whether or not they'll be having children. Putting aside the fact that this is a question you should really discuss before even proposing marriage, in a more competent story, this could have led to actual moments of character development and even some dramatic depth. Instead, it leads to Christian throwing a hissy fit and leaving for a bender. Hey, who needs character development when you've got a horrific cover of INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart" and a spiteful sex scene involving a vibrator?

The best praise that could be mustered for Fifty Shades Freed is that its visuals haven't lost their glossy magazine page look. So the lifestyle of bad decisions, copious sex, and rich living are still as sharpened as they've ever been. Freed certainly looks like it belongs in the Fifty Shades canon, and by time you reach the obligatory montage of what's come before in the series, you'll notice not only that the film matches the visual palette of the series, you'll also realize that this film is as forgettable as the ones that came before it.

For a trilogy that started as laughably bad, Fifty Shades Freed ends it all with a dull, lifeless product to end all dull, lifeless products. It does not go out with a whimper, nor a bang, but a Pinterest board of bad ideas involving storytelling, relationship advice, and general human conduct.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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Fifty Shades Freed is a guilty pleasure without the pleasure: EW review

Senior Writer

Strip the pleasure away from a guilty pleasure and what are you left with exactly? Fifty Shades Freed , the third and final cinematic installment in E.L. James’ trashy S&M trilogy, answers that question with every ludicrous plot twist, stilted line delivery, and too-laughable-to-be-hot sex scene.

Ironically, for a film about the art of the tease, Fifty Shades Freed wastes no time diving right into things. A glossy, envy-inducing montage shows Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Jamie Dornan) getting dolled up for their big wedding day. Soon, they’re exchanging vows — yet another contract of sorts between these two, albeit one that’s more traditional than transgressive. They dash out of the reception, tear off in a sports car, and pull up to his private jet. “You own this?” she asks as if chloroformed into a Kardashian fairy tale. “ We own this,” he replies. Jesus wept.

But just when you begin to worry that Fifty Shades has become less kinky Penthouse Forum and more wish-fulfillment Martha Stewart Weddings , the newlyweds arrive in Paris for their honeymoon. Yachts are unmoored. Topless beaches are basked upon. And preposterous exchanges like this (courtesy of James’ husband, screenwriter Niall Leonard) are uttered: “How come you always braid my hair?” “Hush…. Do you remember your safe word?” Handcuffs are deployed. Moans are moaned. And In the audience, eyes are rolled.

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, there’s a break-in at Grey’s Dr. Evil-like corporate HQ. It’s the dirty work of none other than Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), Anastasia’s creepy ex-boss and nemesis. The honeymoon will have to be put on hold as the couple flies home to stumble through the clumsy machinations of a preposterous howler of a thriller between bouts of vigorous humping and Anastasia’s uneasy awakening into the world of being a kept woman. E.L. James, 1; Feminism, 0.

The dynamic has changed a bit between these two impossibly photogenic ciphers over the course of James’ saga. Christian seems more insecure — more jealous, more possessive, and more willing (or, at least, less reluctant) to occasionally be the bottom in the relationship. Anastasia, on the other hand, is bucking at the gilded cage she finds herself trapped in. She’s more assertive (at least when it suits her interests) and more interested in taking the wheel (literally during a high-speed chase with Hyde, which of course is capped off by a legs-akimbo bucket-seat quickie). The audience I saw this with cracked up the whole time. And not in the we’re-uncomfortable-so-let’s-nervously-laugh way, but in the can-you-believe-this-is-an-actual-movie forehead-slapping way.

The thriller plot with Hyde is wafer thin. So director James Foley (yes, the same James Foley who somehow once directed Glengarry Glen Ross and then apparently lost a best with Satan) appeals to our collective weakness for materialistic envy with ritzy mountain vacations, bubble baths, and visits to the infamous Red Room of Pain. As an actress, Johnson sells all of this hooey better than Dornan, who, three films in, hasn’t gotten much better as an actor. Sure, he has an underwear model’s bod, artfully manicured stubble, and intense Blue Steel stares. He can even sit down at the piano and soulfully belt his way through Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed”. But he still comes off as a daytime soap star who somehow hit the lottery.

Alas, there’s also some trouble in paradise. The newlyweds argue about their differing expectations of what being married means, time tables on starting a family, and even whether or not Anastasia should take her bikini top off on the beach. (Spoiler alert: she does.) But none of this is very interesting. Which leaves us with the sex. There was a time back in the early ‘90s, when steamy erotic thrillers like this unspooled on Cinemax in the wee hours seemingly all the time. They had interchangeable names like Animal Instincts , Body Chemistry , and Sins of Desire . They seemed to sprout up like toadstools in the wake of commercial big-studio hits like Fatal Attraction , 9 ½ Weeks , and Basic Instinct . Those films weren’t very good either. But they at least seemed to embrace their own trashiness without shame. They had a certain integrity about their awfulnesss. Fifty Shades Freed is certainly slicker than those carnal cheapies. But it seems embarrassed to embrace its own pervy nature. It’s kitsch that looks in the mirror and deludes itself into thinking it sees art staring back. D+

Fifty Shades Freed Review

09 Feb 2018

Fifty Shades Freed

Ironically for a film about pushing the boundaries of sexual pleasure, there has always been the sense that the Fifty Shades franchise has played it too safe. Never celebrating the kitsch like one of those ‘90s DTV erotic thrillers with titles like Lethally Blonde, or taking it seriously as a full-on dive into erotic obsession, the results have been tame, mostly poor affairs, not bad enough to be guilty pleasures or good enough to be, well, good. Fifty Shades Freed , the last in E.L. James' trilogy, sadly continues in that vein.

Adapted by James’ husband Niall Leonard, Fifty Shades Freed doesn’t have a story as such. Instead it strings together a series of vignettes comprising different kinds of porn. Of course, there is the BDSM (we get handcuffs on ankles, sex toy teasing, 9½ Weeks style shenanigans with ice cream, almost exclusively played out to slowed down versions of a retro hit) but more often we get wedding porn, fast car porn, big house porn, workplace porn (Anastasia’s publishing house office is ridiculous) etc. Like the previous films, it’s a hymn to lifestyles without any sense of real interior lives behind them.

It’s a hymn to lifestyles without any sense of interior lives behind them.

The first movie had an arc for Anastasia to go on, from virginal student to sexually awakened paramour, but there is no such luck here. The slivers of plot revolve around the return of Ana’s former boss Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson, terrible), the creep from Fifty Shades Darker , who is hell-bent on destroying Ana’s life after she caused him to lose his job. As revenge plots go, it is a slow, dull burn that goes apeshit in the last reel in ways that feel forced. Other story drivers include Christian’s controlling nature, disagreements over having children, an architect (Arielle Kebbel) who turns heads and more revelations about Christian’s past but none of them add up to anything.

While Sam Taylor-Johnson gave the first film a hint of a raised eyebrow, Foley shoots everything with an earnest, technically impressive sheen — if you ever need someone to photograph your dildo drawer, he’s your man — but never anchors it to any meaning. Dornan struggles through it, by turns mortified and befuddled: he is even made to warble through Paul McCartney’s 'Maybe I’m Amazed' to borderline laughable effect.

If there has been one bright spark in this franchise it is Johnson. She manages to breathe life and attitude into Ana in ways that aren’t on the page. But not even she can surmount the risible thriller antics of the final act. Like Kristen Stewart, another refugee from a popular if derided franchise, she needs material and filmmakers to match her talent. She needs to say goodbye to the safe words.

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Fifty Shades Freed : A Spoilereview

Another sequel so awful that it needs to be described in detail to be believed

Dakota Johnson as Ana Steele-Grey in 'Fifty Shades Freed'

For reasons that are now obscure to me—and were by definition ill-conceived—I read Fifty Shades of Grey at that terrible moment in American history when it seemed that everyone else was reading it too. I don’t believe that I read either of the book’s sequels, though I can’t attest to that with much confidence. Suffice to say that I made either the wise decision to skip them or the only marginally less-wise decision to repress all memory of them.

But writing about movies is something I’m paid to do, and occasionally that entails a degree of professional self-sacrifice. This week, the name of that sacrifice is Fifty Shades Freed .

The third and final—let’s pause and savor that word for a moment—adaptation of the “erotic romance” novel series by Erika Mitchell (pen name: E. L. James), Fifty Shades Freed is precisely as atrocious as one might imagine. Which is to say, it is far worse than the first movie —which, though awful, in hindsight looks like Citizen Kane , only with more discussion of dildos. I’d place the new film more or less on a par with the second one , Fifty Shades Darker , which makes sense given that both were filmed concurrently, were directed by James Foley (whose principal recommendation is that he directed Glengarry Glen Ross many, many years ago), and were adapted by Niall Leonard (whose principal recommendation is that he is married to Erika Mitchell).

Fifty Shades Darker : A Spoilereview

Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele in "Fifty Shades of Grey."

Fifty Shades of Dull

It Isn’t About Your Love Language; It’s About Your Partner’s

The good news—and, yes, we are grading on a curve so steep that it’s essentially a vertical drop—is that Fifty Shades Freed is marginally less retrograde and offensive than Fifty Shades Darker . The bad news is that it is even more idiotic, which is in its way a remarkable achievement.

In any case, like its predecessor , it is eminently deserving of one in my occasional series of spoilereviews: a linear enunciation of all the stupid elements of the film that I managed to scribble into my notebook during the screening. (Other examples of the microgenre have included Lucy , Fantastic Four , The Happening , and The Gunman .) To be clear: What follows will give away as many plot developments as possible, as it is intended to serve as an alternative to actually seeing the movie. But I feel confident that the universe of people who would like to laugh at this film is considerably larger than the universe of those who are actually willing to sit through it. So here goes.

1. To catch up anyone who is either unfamiliar with the series or as adept as I may be in the art of repression: In the first film, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), a virginal college student, was persuaded by the billionaire entrepreneur Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) to become his S&M sexual “submissive.” She rebelled vaguely at the end of the film, only to be successfully wooed again in the second, which largely set aside the naughty S&M theme that had been the entire rationale for the enterprise in the first place. (Its “climax” was that Christian took Ana to his Red Room of Pain and … applied massage oil.) The only other bits that I think were of any importance are that 1) Ana’s boss at the Seattle publishing house where she worked sexually assaulted her, so Christian pulled strings to have him fired; and 2) Christian proposed marriage, offering a ring large enough to double as a bocce ball, and Ana accepted.

2. So Fifty Shades Freed opens with a wedding. We watch the gorgeous lace of Ana’s wedding dress being buttoned; we marvel at the hefty, masculine majesty of Christian’s cuff links. Alas, their vows are heartbreakingly conventional: “I promise to love, trust, and protect you”; “I give you my hand and my heart, for as long as we both shall live.” Boo! Where are the references to domination and submission, to flogging and spanking, to the Red Room? What movie is this?

3. After some dancing, Christian tells Ana, “Let’s get out of here. I’m sick of sharing you with all the riff-raff.” Not to get all class warrior here, but that may not be the best phrase for a billionaire to throw around with his now billionaire-by-marriage wife. It sounds a tad, let us say, Steve Mnuchin-y.

4. Christian whisks Ana to the airport, where a private jet is waiting. “You own this?” she asks, incredulous. Hello? He’s spent two movies taking her up in gliders and helicopters and out on million-dollar sailboats. She’s surprised he has a private jet? Ana actually seems to remember what happened in those films even less than I do.

5. Paris! If the Eiffel Tower didn’t give it away, the movie adds the Arc de Triomphe as a secondary clue. They go to the opera. They hold hands. They have tasteful, from-a-distance, no-nudity sex. This may be the worst advertisement for marriage of all time. Your most conservative grandparent is probably getting bored about now.

6. They continue on to the Côte d’Azur. At a topless beach, Ana wants to take off her bikini top, but lifelong-pervert-turned-sudden-prude Christian forbids it. When he goes for a swim, she takes her top off anyway, which may be the most self-actualized thing she’s done in all the movies combined. Progress, I guess.

7. They go back to the luxury yacht they’re staying on. Christian, still peeved that Ana disobeyed him re: toplessness, pulls out handcuffs. She seems aghast. Once again, it appears that she has no recollection of the previous two movies. Is there a roofie subtext to the whole trilogy that is never made explicit?

8. Alas, the honeymoon is cut short. A female subordinate of Christian’s calls to tell him that someone broke into his company’s “server room” and detonated an “explosive device.” Watching the security footage, Ana recognizes the intruder as Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), the former boss who attacked her and was essentially fired by Christian. “Why would he do that?” Ana asks. Really? Crazy or not, his motive seems pretty self-evident. Or is it?

8a. Yes, Jack “Hyde” easily wins the otherwise-close competition for most ridiculously metaphorical surname.

8b. As I noted in the spoilereview for the previous movie, with the exception of security guards, virtually all subordinates in the Fifty Shades universe are female. I may be missing some small exception somewhere, but perhaps the most consistently clear message of the whole series is that women always work for men and not the reverse.

9. Back at Christian’s penthouse apartment in Seattle, Ana meets the staff and is flabbergasted at the question of how she wishes to “run the household.” I swear she was unconscious throughout the first two movies. How I envy her.

10. Ana dismisses the cook for the night because she wants to make dinner. Christian: “I could get used to you in the kitchen.” Ana: “Barefoot and pregnant?” Christian is obviously nonplussed by this response, and it doesn’t appear that it’s over Ana’s possible neglect of footwear. This is what in introductory screenwriting classes is called foreshadowing .

11. Ana shows up at work at the publishing house that exists to imply that she has a “job” even though she almost never seems to perform it. There she learns that she has been promoted to “fiction editor.” A subordinate, Liz (of course: a woman), tartly points out that the promotion occurred despite the fact that “you weren’t even here.”

11a. Unless I’m sorely mistaken, Ana was already promoted to fiction editor in the last movie, after Christian fired the previous fiction editor, her sexually assaulting then-boss, Jack. Maybe she was only acting fiction editor? Or maybe this movie has no better sense of what’s already transpired than Ana herself?

11b. It’s also very much worth noting that in the last movie Christian purchased the publishing house where Ana works, becoming, as they joke repeatedly, her “boss’s boss’s boss.” (Funny!) Could this have played a role in Ana’s meteoric rise from just-graduated newbie assistant to senior editor? Duh, although no one seems to notice but that cranky subordinate Liz. (More on her later.) One could almost imagine Fifty Shades Freed having a deeper, subversive level, in which the wildly rich, constantly self-indulgent Ana and Christian are the villains, and their many lower-income foils and employees are the heroes. But this is a movie that could hardly make more conspicuous that it doesn’t have “levels.”

12. Christian barges into Ana’s office, as he frequently does. He’s mad that she hasn’t changed her email address to “Anastasia Grey .” She explains that she wants to use her maiden name at work and that she loves her job. He explains that she “can’t love it as Anastasia Steele .” (Lest we forget, he is her boss’s boss’s boss, after all.) He adds that she got her job “through hard work and talent.” Pretty much everyone at the screening I attended laughed.

13. He shows her his fancy new product-placed Audi sports car. She pleads, “Can I drive? Let me drive. Let me drive it.” He ignores her and drives it himself.

14. He takes her to a beautiful lakeside mansion, and she says she feels as though she’s been there before. He reminds her that she saw it when they were out on the sailboat in the previous movie, so he bought it for her.

15. He’s hired an architect, Gia, who meets them at the house. She is beautiful and clearly has her eyes on Christian. Will she be the foil/complication that this limp film so desperately needs? No, she will not. This is the only time we see her, although characters will refer back to how wonderful her breasts are on multiple occasions.

16. Gia wants to tear down the entire mansion and replace it with an ultra-modern “smart home” featuring self-cleaning windows. Ana hates this idea and hates the way Gia looks at Christian, so she tells her, “You may call me Mrs. Grey . Or you can get back into your shit-colored car and drive back to Seattle.” It’s genuinely head-spinning how quickly Ana has changed her mind on the whole surname question and gone from Nice Girl Next Door to Nasty Entitled Rich Person. But at least she doesn’t call Gia “riff-raff.”

17. Christian is so impressed with Ana’s transformation that he allows her to drive the car. That puts him a full four months ahead of Saudi Arabia, which has announced that it is rescinding its ban on women drivers in June. Delighted at her newfound right, Ana enthuses, “I’m a race-car driver!” Attentive viewers may notice the echo of the last movie, in which Christian let her take the wheel of the sailboat and she gushed, “I can’t believe I’m doing this! I’m the captain!”

18. A mysterious SUV starts tailing them—is it Jack?—leading to what may be the least dynamic car chase committed to celluloid since the retirement of the Model T. After losing the SUV, they pull into a parking lot. Ana climbs onto Christian’s lap and they have sex. Ana giggles.

19. Christian needs to go to New York for meetings. Ana offers to give him a haircut and asks where the scissors are. He says they’re in his desk, and when she goes to look for them she finds a revolver. Is this an example of the dramatic principle of “ Chekhov’s gun ”? Of course it is. While Ana cuts Christian’s hair, he gropes her. She giggles.

20. Christian, concerned about the possible threat from Jack, makes Ana promise to come directly home from work while he’s out of town. Instead, she goes out drinking with her friend Kate. When she gets back to the apartment, Jack is waiting for her with a kitchen knife. Luckily, he’s captured by Ana’s two security guards. One says, “You better restrain him.” The other replies: “I don’t have anything.” Ana announces: “We do.” This is the high point of the movie so far, and perhaps the only intentionally comic moment of the series to date.

20a. It’s worth noting that Jack, whose only job that we’re aware of was as a fiction editor, has essentially become a super-criminal, capable of penetrating extensive security to attack Christian’s corporate office and very nearly kidnap his wife. Keep this in mind the next time you piss off a fiction editor.

21. When Ana wakes up, Christian is back and is angrily morning-drinking. Later on, he will take her to the Red Room and torment her with a vibrator without allowing her sexual release. He explains that this is how he feels when she doesn’t do what he asks. It doesn’t seem like a very apt comparison.

22. Ana and Christian puzzle over why Jack (now incarcerated) has been out to get them. Once again, does anyone remember the previous movie, in which they had him fired for sexual assault, effectively ending his career?

23. Ana is back at work when Christian shows up unannounced. “I think you deserve a break,” he declares, before bundling her onto a plane to Aspen. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Ana’s job at the publishing house is simply to wait around until Christian barges in crankily or whisks her away for an impromptu vacation.

23a. Could this last detail be semi-autobiographical? If the fiction editor in charge of Erika Mitchell’s Fifty Shades novels spent all of her time on vacation, it might help explain the books’ overall quality.

24. Ana and Christian are in Aspen, along with his brother, Elliott, her friend Kate—the two are dating—his sister, Mia, and her boyfriend. Christian plays “ Maybe I’m Amazed ” on the piano and sings, faux soulfully. Mia’s boyfriend, speaking for the entire filmgoing audience, says, “Maybe I’ve heard enough.” This is the movie’s second high point. There won’t be a third.

25. Ana has a nightmare about Jack. Christian wakes up to find her in the kitchen eating ice cream. She spoons some onto his chest and licks it off. He spoons some onto her inner thighs and licks it off. They have sex on the table. Ana giggles. Look, I’m all for having fun during sex, but if I were Christian I’d be concerned about the fact that Ana giggles every time he drops trou.

26. Christian’s security guard has done a background check on Jack and determined that before coming to Seattle he was also a fiction editor in New York and Chicago. (That’s probably how he learned to be a criminal mastermind.) Also, he was in and out of foster homes in Detroit. Christian says, “So was I.” To quote the great Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog : “ What a crazy random happenstance. ”

27. Elliott proposes to Kate, but not before mentioning how promiscuous he was before he met her. Pro tip, fellas: Leave that part out.

28. Back in Seattle, Christian takes Ana to the Red Room and has her choose one of his assortment of butt plugs. Later, at work, she reminisces about the experience. So I guess that’s a third thing her job entails. Meanwhile, a judge releases Jack on bail for no discernable reason whatsoever.

29. Ana goes to the gynecologist. It turns out she has repeatedly forgotten to take her contraceptive shots and is now six to seven weeks pregnant. But cut her some slack: It’s hard to stay on top of every little bit of life maintenance when you spend all your time taking vacations and fantasizing about butt plugs.

30. Ana tells Christian about the pregnancy over dinner. He’s furious. (Remember his “barefoot and pregnant” response?) He stays out late and gets drunk, and when he returns Ana learns that he’s been out with Elena Lincoln, the older woman who seduced him into S&M when he was 15. Now she’s angry and locks herself in the Red Room to sleep. The fact that this is what it’s now being used for tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the erotic quotient of the movie.

31. Ana tells Christian, “Babies happen when you have sex.” A more accurate formulation would be, “Babies happen when you have sex and can’t be bothered to keep up with a form of contraception that is specifically designed for its extreme ease of use.”

32. At work, Ana gets a call from Jack, who has kidnapped Christian’s sister, Mia. Ana must get him $5 million dollars in cash within a few hours or he’ll kill her. Ana mustn’t tell Christian.

33. Are you bored yet? I am. After all, the whole point of this exercise is to take less time than the movie itself. So let’s cut to the chase. Through comically absurd machinations, Ana gets the money and meets Jack at an abandoned building on the edge of town. It turns out he has an accomplice: Liz, the subordinate who thought it odd that Ana got a big promotion despite not having been in the office for weeks. Jack punches and kicks Ana. But she brought the pistol from the desk—thank you, Chekhov!—and shoots Jack in the leg. The police arrive as Ana passes out.

34. After Ana returns home from the hospital, she and Christian receive more information about Jack. It turns out that—wait for it—he and Christian spent time in the same foster home in Detroit when they were kids. Christian was adopted by a rich family, while Jack was left behind, destined for a life of drudgery and destitution as a high-end fiction editor. That’s why he was out to get Ana and Christian.

35. Christian feels bad about the charmed life he’s led. Ana reminds him, “You’re a man of honor. And you treat people well.” She has literally forgotten every single thing that’s happened throughout the course of these films.

36. The movie ends with a montage reminding us of all Ana and Christian’s romantic moments together. (None, notably, are from the current film.) He saves her from being run over by a bicyclist; he takes her up in a helicopter, a glider, and a private jet; he brings her out on a sailboat. It was only now that I realized: This entire trilogy has been an R-rated version of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go . Which raises the inevitable question: Will Christian let Ana drive the pickle car?

Fifty Shades Freed Review

By Joshua Starnes

4 out of 10

Dakota Johnson as Anastasia ‘Ana’ Steele-Grey Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey Eric Johnson as Jack Hyde Max Martini as Jason Taylor Brant Daugherty as Luke Sawyer Arielle Kebbel as Gia Matteo Fay Masterson as Gail Jones Luke Grimes as Elliot Grey Eloise Mumford as Katherine Kavanagh Rita Ora as Mia Grey Marcia Gay Harden as Grace Trevelyan Grey Tyler Hoechlin as Boyce Fox Hiro Kanagawa as Detective Clark

Directed by James Foley

Fifty Shades Freed Review:

A review for a Fifty Shades film may be the most useless thing ever created, even more so than those for the most recent highly-marketed, big-budget adventure. Not just because – three films in with franchise finale Fifty Shades Freed – the battle lines of those who are going to see these films and those who aren’t have been set; but because few series in recent memory have been so blasé about offering anything to anyone because of that security. It’s not just that it offers up the weakest version of what it thinks its audience wants, but that it makes no bones about even thinking about doing more than that.

Granted the phrase ‘nothing to offer’ is extremely subjective. It has planes and yachts and mansions and high rises and sports cars and big diamonds and pretty clothes adorning pretty people and the sort of fluffy melodrama that has been a staple of soap operas since the dawn of time. And, to quote one Anastasia Steele-Grey (Johnson), “boobs as far as the eye can see, boobs in boobland.” Following eccentric billionaire Christian Grey’s (Dornan) surprise proposal at the end of Fifty Shades Darker – and a whirlwind ceremony over the opening credits – the newly-married couple settles down to doing pretty much exactly what they were doing before, enjoying being super rich and having a secret room full of sex toys. Or they would if Christian’s controlling nature would stop getting in the way and make Anastasia consider second thoughts. Or if a disgruntled former boss was stalking the couple in a quest for revenge …

It’s both obvious and completely unsurprising that the story of the Greys would encompass every frothy soap opera plot under the sun short of evil twins or UFO abductions. It’s also fine, that was part of its appeal (so to speak); that and the promise of kinky but tame sex. There are a lot of opportunities within those constraints for some interesting storytelling – Peter Greenway’s entire oeuvre is practically built on it. And while there’s no need to delve quite into Greenway or Cronenberg levels of psychosexual dysfunction, there is definitely the bones of a story within 50 Shades detailing whether and how two people could change important facets of their personality in the name of a long-term relationship. And these would not be incompatible with indulging the surface-oriented pleasures that are the series’ bread and butter. But that would take work and might not be what the target audience wants, so why go to all the trouble?

Which isn’t to say that stuff isn’t there, even if it is buried deep in the source material by E L James . Christian’s playroom is an extremely surface-oriented metaphor for his own control issues but one that could be used to mirror changes in his core character and relationships. Instead, it is treated as a vestigial memento of the series’ past, something to be trotted out with each visit, because it is expected like James Bond’s martini request. And that’s about the level of interest to expect from everyone involved. Director James Foley ( Glengarry Glen Ross ) obviously knows how to make a film, but has anything ever felt so factory level as Fifty Shades Freed and in the worst way possible? Even the worst action movie or horror film in the world has the odd jolt of adrenaline; for a film about sex, Fifty Shades Freed is completely absent of joy.

Is there anything worthwhile to take from it? It’s pretty; the fantasy value of the lives of the rich and famous is real, we wouldn’t pay so much attention if it wasn’t. And in five-minute vignettes, it would probably be harder to tell how empty it all is. And Johnson still proves herself a remarkably-gifted actress, able to spin even the most absurd lines into something human and taking full advantage of the rare gem which is (or could be) genuinely funny. Part of that is being the heroine and point-of-view character. She is one of the few to be allowed something like a human reaction to the weirdness around her, but it is also easy to imagine another actress stuck within the character and being smothered by it. Much the way Dornan is smothered by Christian (or maybe we just wish he were). If it’s clear how much Johnson brings to her role, it’s less obvious how much Christian’s faults are his actors or his creators, but it is clear next to Anastasia all of his flaws are magnified. Christian is, as explained, supposed to be tightly wound, but the Dornan version of that is to act like a robot. If Johnson manages to make a meal out of some very light dialogue, Dornan makes almost all of his lines worse.

Will any of this matter to anyone? No. The people who want to see this will see it; the ones who don’t, won’t. The best that can be said of the whole thing is that there won’t be any more until some other studio tries to copy Fifty Shades ’ success. Let’s all hope we’ve learned our lesson by then.

Fifty Shades Freed

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FIFTY SHADES FREED

"contradictory messages mixed with perversity and smut".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Stalking, revenge, jealousy, kidnapping and attempted kidnapping, blackmail, and deceit but mostly rebuked.

More Detail:

FIFTY SHADES FREED is the third movie adapted from a controversial trilogy of books which involve a young woman who has a torrid affair with a wealthy young man involved in sadomasochism. In this third movie, Ana marries Christian Grey, but the couple is still having control issues, and Ana is stalked by the man who tried to rape her in the second movie. There’s less sadomasochism in FIFTY SHADES FREED, but more graphic sex scenes with explicit nudity, mixed with a surprising pro-life theme.

The movie opens with a secularized marriage ceremony between Ana and Christian. Though Christian is less demanding, he still has control issues. For example, he’s resigned to Ana working during the day as the fiction editor at a major book publishing firm, but he wants her to come home right away. This becomes an even bigger demand when Ana’s former boss, who tried to rape her, has been released from prison and seems to be stalking her.

Things come to a head when the former boss tries to get revenge against Ana and Christian and when Ana discovers she’s pregnant.

Interspersed within this basic plot are lots of sensual, explicit bedroom scenes between Ana and Christian.

FIFTY SHADES FREED is both a melodramatic romance and a thriller about a stalker. The romance is often rather silly, eliciting laughs from some viewers. The thriller portion of the movie plays better, but it competes with the ups and downs in the personal drama between Ana and Christian. Setting aside their controversial nature, the bedroom scenes just slow down both stories. Despite its slick production values, therefore, FIFTY SHADES FREED doesn’t quite work on a basic story level.

There seems to be less sadomasochism in FIFTY SHADES FREED than the first two movies. As noted above, however, the story is often interrupted by other, more steamy, explicit bedroom scenes. Even so, twice in the movie, Christian shackles Ana’s hands and ankles. In the second scene, he’s angry with Ana, so he teases her, she becomes upset, and they have an argument that could end their marriage. A final scene shows Ana wearing a skimpy costume, kneeling before Christian and saying, “I await your pleasure, sir.” Ultimately, therefore, while there may be less actual sadomasochism in FIFTY SHADES FREED, and despite Ana’s assertions of independence, the movie still has an attitude promoting such perversion, which, in reality, amounts to a rape fantasy that obviously benefits men, not women.

Finally, early in the movie, when Ana asks Christian if he wants to have children, he says yes, eventually, but doesn’t want to “share” Ana with anyone else for the moment. So, when she announces to Christian that she’s pregnant because she’s been skipping her birth control shots, he becomes extremely upset. This leads to the biggest argument yet between them, an argument that threatens their marriage. Eventually, however, Ana convinces Christian that having a baby is a good thing. She also assures him that she thinks he’d make a great father. Sure enough, a final scene shows a pregnant Ana walking with Christian and their two-year-old boy in large beautiful yard next to their beautiful, newly-remodeled home.

This pro-life, pro-family theme belies the graphic, offensive and extremely lewd content in FIFTY SHADES FREED.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

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Screen Rant

Callum keith rennie’s 10 best acting roles (including star trek: discovery).

Callum Keith Rennie stars as Captain Rayner in Star Trek: Discovery but has also enjoyed standout roles in Battlestar Galactica & Californication.

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery season 5

Callum Keith Rennie has a diverse acting history with impressive roles in movies and TV shows.
Rennie excels at portraying complex characters with depth and nuance.
His latest role as Captain Rayner in Star Trek: Discovery season 5 showcases his bold and promising acting skills.

Callum Keith Rennie, who plays the Kellerun Captain Rayner in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, has a distinguished and impressive acting career, and here are Rennie's 10 best movie and television roles. Born in Tyne and Wear, NE England, UK, Rennie moved to Canada with his family at a young age. Rennie successfully launched his acting career with appearances in several critically acclaimed films, including Hard Core Logo - a rock band mockumentary, and several notable television guest roles, including appearances on The X-Files, Highlander, and Outer Limits.

Rennie's international big break came from his casting in Due South , leading to multiple support, guest-star, and leading roles in a number of movies and television series. A keen painter and creative, Callum Keith Rennie's acting style and character choices reveal a preference for unexpected and complex roles - portraying multiple levels of personality and understanding through various mediums and genres. Rennie has established a name in science fiction, in particular, starring in Battlestar Galactica, Marvel's Jessica Jones, The Umbrella Academy , and, more recently, joining the Star Trek: Discovery season 5 cast as Captain Rayner.

Every Upcoming Star Trek Movie & TV Show

10 memento (2000), callum keith rennie as dodd.

Memento , a psychological neo-noir thriller released in 2000, delves into the intricate nature of memory and perspective through the eyes of its lead character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Directed by Christopher Nolan , Memento cleverly portrays Leonard's struggle with anterograde amnesia by presenting scenes in reverse order in color and chronological sequences in black and white. Alongside Pearce, Callum Keith Rennie shines as Dodd , a drug dealer entangled in Leonard's quest to find his wife's killer.

Memento 's exploration of deception within a criminal environment adds complexity to the narrative as Leonard navigates a world where trust is scarce. Leonard grapples with his condition by relying on tattoos, polaroid photographs, and Post-it notes to piece together his fragmented memories. Memento 's unique storytelling approach has garnered a dedicated following among fans of the genre. Rennie's portrayal of Dodd, a character wrestling with morality and deception adds depth to the film's narrative , making Memento a memorable and thought-provoking cinematic experience.

9 Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) & Fifty Shades Freed (2018)

Callum keith renne plays ray steele.

In Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Freed , the feature film adaptations of E.L. James' erotic novels, Callum Keith Rennie stars as Ray Steele , the stepfather of Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson). Separated from Anastasia's mother, Carla May Wilks (Jennifer Ehle), Ray takes on the parental role and meets love interest Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) in the first Fifty Shades movie . Considered by Anastasia to be her 'real father,' Ray shares the technical term of stepfather with Carla's new husband.

Sharing a practical and down-to-earth selection of interests with Dornan's Christian Grey, Ray Steele is a warm and caring family character who plays a significant role in the heroine's life. Callum Keith Rennie's portrayal of the character is natural and easy , revealing a comfortable warmth and consistency throughout both movies. While not a leading role here, Rennie's performance is rich and appropriately understated.

8 The Firm (2012)

Callum keith rennie as ray mcdeere.

A high-quality and captivating legal-thriller drama series, AXN's The Firm is based on John Grisham's novel of the same name - picking up where the book (1991) and Tom Cruise movie (1993) ended. Following the experiences of lead character Mitchell McDeere (Josh Lucas) and his family as they emerge from witness protection ten years later and face the realities of that change, continuing danger, and their own troubling past experiences. In The Firm, Callum Keith Rennie plays Ray McDeere, Mitch's brother. Ray is a detective working for Mitch's new law firm with his girlfriend Tammy (Juliette Lewis), operating from a small former travel agency. It's an exciting and varied role showcasing Rennie's easy adaptability and creative flair.

7 Impulse (2018)

Callum keith rennie plays nikolai.

In the YouTube Premium series Impulse , Callum Keith Rennie delivers a captivating performance as Nikolai , a troubled yet gifted individual of Romanian descent with supernatural abilities. Originally a recurring character in Impulse season one, Rennie's portrayal of Nikolai became a central role in season two. Nikolai's traumatic childhood and subsequent actions, such as killing his abusive uncle and kidnapping Henrietta "Henry" Cole's father (Maddie Hasson), reveal a complex and deeply flawed character.

Despite his acts of violence, Nikolai is loyal and compassionate and later becomes a mentor to Henry, assisting her in controlling her own powers before meeting a tragic end at her hands. Rennie's portrayal of Nikolai underscores his versatility as an actor , bringing depth and subtlety to the character's conflicted nature. Nikolai's commitment and empathy are juxtaposed against his darker impulses and the consequences of his actions, resulting in a compelling portrayal of a morally ambiguous figure.

6 The Umbrella Academy (2019-2024)

Callum keith renne plays lester pocket / harlan cooper.

Callum Keith Rennie plays the enigmatic Lester Pocket in The Umbrella Academy season 3 - a character shrouded in mystery and possessing immense power that he struggles to control. To cope with his overwhelming abilities, Lester travels with a suitcase filled with cassette tapes playing white noise to drown out his surroundings and contain his deadly bursts of power. Pocket's true identity as Harlan Cooper is later unveiled, with other revelations also surfacing through the twisting narrative.

Rennie's portrayal of Lester Pocket/Harlan Cooper delves into themes of power, emotional turmoil, and the consequences of lacking control.

As Harlan strives to control and rid himself of his powers , he forms a bond with Viktor (Elliot Page), only to meet a tragic end at the hands of Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman). Rennie's portrayal of Lester Pocket/Harlan Cooper delves into themes of power, emotional turmoil, and the consequences of lacking control. The Umbrella Academy season 3 promises a gripping narrative as the characters navigate their complex relationships and confront their inner demons.

5 Marvel's Jessica Jones (2018)

Callum keith rennei plays dr. karl malus.

In Marvel's Jessica Jones season 2 , Callum Keith Rennie portrays the enigmatic Dr. Karl Malus , a brilliant yet unethical and morally questionable scientist. Malus delves into illegal human testing to research superhuman abilities, saving Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) with a genetic experimentation procedure following a tragic car crash in her youth. Malus also saved Alisa Jones (Janet McTeer), Jessica's mother, from the same crash - but the more severe injuries and treatment resulted in an uncontrollable, murderous rage that required seclusion.

Dr. Malus is later kidnapped by Jessica's adopted sister, Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor) , and forced to perform a similar procedure to bestow her with superhuman ability, but the operation is interrupted and leads to medical difficulties. Ultimately, Malus meets his demise after destroying his lab, believing his experiment failed. Callum Keith Rennie's portrayal of the troubled character is nuanced yet subtle , with Dr. Malus emerging as a complex and multifaceted antagonist who accomplishes great things but with, at best, mixed results.

4 Due South (1997-1999)

Callum keith rennie plays detective stanley raymond kowalski.

Joining the Canadian crime comedy-drama series Due South for seasons 3 and 4, Callum Keith Rennie played Polish-American Detective Stanley Raymond "Ray" Kowalski . Serving with the Chicago Police Department's 27th Precinct, Kowalski partnered with Canadian Mountie Benton Fraser (Paul Gross) and Fraser's pet wolf, Diefenbaker, to solve crimes and lead the much-loved series. Brought in to replace Dr. Raymond Vecchio (David Marciano) when the character is assigned to work deep undercover, Kowalski loosely impersonates Vecchio to protect his identity until his return.

Callum Keith Rennie's performance as Detective Kowalski is dramatic, fond, and persuasive.

Marking Callum Keith Rennie's first international recognition , his role as the easy-going and amicable police detective Kowalski showcased an accomplished performance and an accessible charisma that blended well with an interesting ensemble and subject matter. Subtly highlighting a charming range of sentimental personality quirks, Callum Keith Rennie's performance as Detective Kowalski is dramatic, fond, and persuasive.

3 Californication (2008-2013)

Callum keith rennie as lew ashby.

As Californication 's Lew Ashby, Callum Keith Rennie plays a main character from the show's second season and a recurring character in seasons five and six. A record producer who asks Hank Moody (David Duchovny) to write his biography after spending time together in jail, Lew forms a close friendship with Moody and reflects many of the lead character's traits. A hedonistic chauvinist, Lew is impulsive, destructive, uncontained, and occasionally morally reprehensible . He enjoys hosting wild parties at his mansion home in Laurel Canyon, and like many of Rennie's other characters, Lew Ashby's character doesn't survive the show.

Rennie's performance intelligently balances Ashby's louder depravities and attitudes with quiet vulnerability, loneliness, and (generally) genuine good intent.

At the end of Californication season 2, Lew accidentally snorts heroin instead of cocaine and dies , but his character often appears to Hank through dreams and imaginary sequences after his demise. This unusual shift in reality and perspective casts a new light on the character. Rennie's performance intelligently balances Ashby's louder depravities and attitudes with quiet vulnerability, loneliness, and (generally) genuine good intent.

2 Star Trek: Discovery (2024)

Callum keith rennie as captain rayner.

Callum Keith Rennie joins the cast of Star Trek: Discovery season 5 as Captain Rayner, the formidable Kellerun officer . Commanding Starfleet's USS Antares, Rayner is portrayed as disciplined and resolute, with a gruff and intelligent demeanor . Demoted for insubordination in Discovery season 5, episode 2, "Under the Twin Moons," Rayner becomes Captain Michael Burnham's (Sonequa Martin-Green) First Officer on the USS Discovery, enhancing the compelling yet challenging dynamic between the two characters.

Star Trek: Discovery' s fans have already drawn parallels between Captain Rayner and Star Trek: Picard 's Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick), recognizing the characters' shared initially standoffish and unlikeable yet ultimately lovable similarities. Rennie's portrayal of Rayner is bold, impactful, and promising , offering a fresh, memorable character that hints at exciting future developments.

1 Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009)

Callum keith rennie as leoben conoy.

In Syfy's acclaimed Battlestar Galactica , created by Ronald D. Moore, Callum Keith Rennie played the enigmatic, deceptive, and pivotal character Leoben Conoy, also known as Cylon Number Two . Initially introduced as an arms dealer in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries, Rennie's portrayal of Conoy set a dark and foreboding tone that evolved as he became a prominent series regular over Battlestar Galactica 's four seasons. His complex depiction of multiple versions of the Cylon model added a philosophical depth to the character.

Ronald D. Moore was an acclaimed writer-producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , and Star Trek: Voyager before he rebooted Battlestar Galactica.

Rennie skillfully explored themes of identity, morality, and spirituality, imbuing Leoben with a manipulative nature that made him a formidable and dangerous adversary and showcased the character's obsessions and profound insights. Rennie's portrayal of Leoben added intricate layers to Battlestar Galactica 's underlying themes , highlighting an impressive acting prowess and an exceptional ability to bring multilayered complexities to his characters, just as Callum Keith Rennie now brings to Star Trek: Discovery.

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream on Paramount+.

IMAGES

Review: 'Fifty Shades Freed' is one of the worst movies I've ever seen
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COMMENTS

Fifty Shades Freed movie review (2018)
Reviews Fifty Shades Freed Sheila O'Malley February 09, 2018. ... When compared to, say, some of the films of Catherine Breillat, the "Fifty Shades" movies come off as coy '60s films about marriage, commitment, and—adorably—male ineptitude in the kitchen. ("Fifty Shades Freed," the latest film, shows Christian Grey trying to make dinner for ...
Fifty Shades Freed
Fifty Shades Freed: 'Mrs. Grey Will See You Now' - Trailer. Fifty Shades Freed. 2018, Romance/Drama, 1h 45m. 194 Reviews 5,000+ Ratings ALL CRITICS TOP CRITICS VERIFIED AUDIENCE ALL AUDIENCE. What ...
Fifty Shades Freed
The simple truth is that Ana and Christian are still wholly unconvincing in their coupling. Full Review | Original Score: 2.0/4.0 | Sep 7, 2020. Jason Fraley WTOP (Washington, D.C.) This trilogy ...
Fifty Shades Freed Review: Delightfully Absurd Trilogy Goes Out with a
Fifty Shades Freed, more so than the other two entries in this absurd yet undeniably enjoyable trilogy, has almost no narrative drive until the last 30 minutes. The film is more of a victory lap ...
Review: Finally, the Audience Is 'Fifty Shades Freed'
Feb. 8, 2018. Previously on "One Bruise at a Time" (a.k.a. the first two "Fifty Shades" outings ): Ana and Christian (Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan), our slap-and-tickle surrogates ...
Fifty Shades Freed (2018)
Fifty Shades Freed: Directed by James Foley. With Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson, Eloise Mumford. Anastasia and Christian get married, but Jack Hyde continues to threaten their relationship.
Fifty Shades Freed Review: It's a Pleasure to Watch
Fifty Shades Freed 's director, James Foley, and cinematographer, John Schwartzman, keep the movie's sex scenes elegant and sleek, but not airless. This is a case where a woman's nudity is ...
Film Review: 'Fifty Shades Freed'
Film Review: 'Fifty Shades Freed' Reviewed at Salle Pleyel, Paris, Feb. 6, 2018. ... There is a new book series steamier than 50 shades maybe that will turn into a movie. Dakota is so pretty ...
'Fifty Shades Freed' Review
Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan are back for 'Fifty Shades Freed,' the conclusion to the trilogy based on E.L. James' best-selling novels. Closing the book on what is arguably one of the worst ...
Fifty Shades Freed
Fifty Shades Freed - Metacritic. Summary Believing they have left behind shadowy figures from their past, newlyweds Christian and Ana fully embrace an inextricable connection and shared life of luxury. But just as she steps into her role as Mrs. Grey and he relaxes into an unfamiliar stability, new threats could jeopardize their happy ending ...
Fifty Shades Freed Movie Review
Parents need to know that Fifty Shades Freed is the final installment in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, movies based on E.L. James' best-selling erotic romance novels originally written as Twilight fan fiction. Like the other two movies, it's an erotic drama with more bedroom action than pretty much anything else. Like Twilight's Breaking Dawn, Fifty Shades Freed starts with the main ...
Fifty Shades Freed (2018)
dave-mcclain 9 February 2018. "Fifty Shades Freed" (R, 1:45) is the third and final installment in the trilogy of erotic S&M-tinged movies based on the novels by E.L. James (after 2015's "Fifty Shades of Grey" and 2017's "Fifty Shades Darker"). This one begins where most romantic films end - with a wedding. Having accepted the sweet marriage ...
Fifty Shades Freed Review
The Fifty Shades movies are less like movies and more like Sharper Image catalogues, but with a lot more sex in them. ... Fifty Shades Freed Review The Fifty Shades trilogy ends exactly as it ...
Movie Review: Fifty Shades Freed (2018)
Like its two predecessors, the style-guide look of Fifty Shades Freed is the only thing not set out punish, test, or corrupt our inner goodness. There's no trouncing the refined garbs and modish sets of " Fifty Shades of Grey ," but Shay Cunliffe's costumes and Nelson Coates' production design do fleetingly liven the sterile atmosphere.
Fifty Shades Freed (film)
Fifty Shades Freed is a 2018 American erotic romantic drama film directed by James Foley and written by Niall Leonard, and based on E. L. James's 2012 novel of the same name.It is the third and final installment in the Fifty Shades film series, following Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and Fifty Shades Darker (2017). The film stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan as Anastasia Steele and Christian ...
Fifty Shades Freed Review
Movies Fifty Shades Freed review February 9, 2018 | By Caroline Preece. Movies Fifty Shades Darker Review February 10, 2017 | By David Crow. Movies Fifty Shades of Grey Review
Fifty Shades Freed Review
If Fifty Shades Freed had gone the way of the classic USA Network erotic thriller, ... Night Swim Review: 2024 Movies Can Really Only Get Better From Here. By Eric Eisenberg January 04, 2024.
Fifty Shades Freed review: A guilty pleasure without the pleasure
Fifty Shades Freed: 19 changes from page to screen Fifty Shades of consent: How the erotic franchise helped start the conversation E.L. James' The Mister is so much worse than Fifty Shades: EW review
Fifty Shades Freed Review
Fifty Shades Freed, the last in E.L. James' trilogy, sadly continues in that vein. Adapted by James' husband Niall Leonard,Fifty Shades Freed doesn't have a story as such. Instead it strings ...
'Fifty Shades Freed' Review: An Awful Trilogy Comes to an End
Become a Subscriber. The third and final—let's pause and savor that word for a moment—adaptation of the "erotic romance" novel series by Erika Mitchell (pen name: E. L. James), Fifty ...
Fifty Shades Freed Review
A review for a Fifty Shades film may be the most useless thing ever created, even more so than those for the most recent highly-marketed, big-budget adventure. Not just because - three films in ...
FIFTY SHADES FREED
FIFTY SHADES FREED is both a melodramatic romance and a thriller about a stalker. The romance is often rather silly, eliciting laughs from some viewers. The thriller portion of the movie plays better, but it competes with the ups and downs in the personal drama between Ana and Christian. Setting aside their controversial nature, the bedroom ...
Watch Fifty Shades Freed
Newlyweds Anastasia and Christian barely begin to settle into postnuptial bliss when a shadowy figure from the past threatens their happily-ever-after. Watch trailers & learn more.
Callum Keith Rennie's 10 Best Acting Roles (Including Star Trek: Discovery)
In Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Freed, the feature film adaptations of E.L. James' erotic novels, Callum Keith Rennie stars as Ray Steele, the stepfather of Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson).Separated from Anastasia's mother, Carla May Wilks (Jennifer Ehle), Ray takes on the parental role and meets love interest Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) in the first Fifty Shades movie.

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