The Fifty Shades franchise is new to me. I did not see either of the first two in this trilogy of movies for delusional single women who have a lot of cats. I heard there were boobs in them, though, and that made it inevitable that I’d get around to watching at least one in a theater. I’m a sucker for nipples on the big screen.
I felt really fucking weird and self-conscious seeing Fifty Shades Freed alone. Most normal guys would just stay home and watch real porn. So, I talked my buddy Worm into coming with me. But then I felt weird asking for two tickets and the cashier seeing we were two dudes, and Worm refused to wear makeup and a wig. Later, they sent someone into the theater with a flashlight to make sure we weren’t jerking each other off amidst the sea of middle-aged women in Christmas sweaters.
We weren’t jerking. At least, I wasn’t. I just sat in awe at how fucking stupid, and dull, and sad a spectacle Fifty Shades Freed is. My balls shriveled early and stayed retracted inside my body for the entire 105 minutes. Is this what cat ladies think is sexy? Boring assholes rubbing up against each other in a dimly-lit West Elm catalog? I never thought I’d get bored with tits, but when they’re the only perky things in the entire movie, it’s pretty fucking easy to get bored.
The Fifty Shades of Grey series is about two intensely dull people—assholes, really—with a buttload of money and, well, a black hole where personality should be. Neither Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) nor Anastasia Steele (Dakota Fanning) have any interesting traits. They aren’t even human. They’re consumption machines, owning a lot of fancy shit: houses, cars, clothes and furniture. It provides them with a clean, modern backdrop upon which to mope.
It opens with them getting married in a glamorous, dewdrop-light wedding. This is followed by them arguing about whether they want kids and whether she will take his name. What the fuck? What the hell have they been discussing in all the time before the wedding? Are we supposed to be rooting for these two dimfucks who married without even knowing the sort of shit marriages are based on about each other?
Grey apparently has made a fortune, but how he does so is about as clear as it is in the case of Bruce Wayne. The dick isn’t even a philanthropist or crimefighter. He’s an immature fuck with insecurity issues. He shows no aptitude for anything besides being petty. He pouts in his skyrise, his lakehouse and in Aspen. He proves the old adage that money can’t buy happiness. It can, however, buy you softly-lit misery.
Grey is a perfect match for Anastasia because she’s got the charm of spoiled milk. Same face most of the time, too. How the fuck can someone this rich have this much baggage, bangs this shitty, and a mouthful of baby teeth? Seriously, Dakota Johnson has gapped tiny teeth. I kept thinking, “shut your weird fucking mouth.” At least she can probably floss easily.
These two are the last people you’d want to be cornered by at a party; they’d have absolutely nothing interesting to say, and no life experiences. They’d just tell you about how nice the bidet was in their suite in Paris. Worse, though, is that they live in places that say nothing about them. Their expensive houses say nothing because they were designed and decorated by others. These are just a couple of fuckwits placed against pricey backdrops.
While Grey is employed as a mysterious billionaire, Anastasia is a fiction editor at a publisher whose offices are in a cozy tea shop, and where nobody has a computer. She was promoted while on her honeymoon (neat trick!) and makes big decisions like telling a woman working at a drafting easel to “Make the type by two points bigger in the hardcover.” I guess she’s the boss because she knows only people with poor eyesight buy hardbacks. Since the office has no computers, how the fuck does this woman increase the type size from her easel? By calling down to the monks in the basement to write bigger on the parchment?
Based on how little skill she shows, and how little she actually works (after coming back from her honeymoon, she admires her new office and has a bunch of sex before Grey whisks her away for a vacation because she “needs a break”), I sensed that Anastasia’s job was make-believe busy work, only she didn’t know. Sort of like the time Mrs. Filthy told me they were giving away Twix for free at a gas station twelve miles away, but really she just wanted me to stop marching around the apartment banging a pot and shouting the “Libby’s on the Label” jingle over and over.
Her rich husband hired all these people to pretend and decorated an office the way she imagined the publishing world looked. She’d come in and press buttons on a phone and pretend to drink tea with her teddy bear and dolls. Maybe there was a toy cash register in there that went “cha-ching,” and she sometimes sold plastic fruit to her “employees.” Other days, she could make real cupcakes in this tiny oven that used a lightbulb as the heating element. She did such a good job she got “Good Reader” and “Great job!” ribbons, and she had the most gold stars by her name in the break room.
Grey and Anastasia have a lot of sex, which is thrown in at intervals that aren’t in sync with the story, just like in real porn! It’s supposed to be BDSM shit with handcuffs and a secret sex dungeon. Nobody pees on anyone, though, and nobody gets their chest shit on, spooged across the face, or locked in a dog kennel. In other words, it’s pretty fucking vanilla. In one scene, they drip ice cream on each other and lick it off. That is the only scene in which the two of them seem happy. Since they don’t smile any other time, I deduce that it is the ice cream that causes pleasure, not each other.
The plot, what little of it there is, involves some guy from the past who wants to hurt Grey and Anastasia. He does it arbitrarily, sometimes trying to kidnap, sometimes trying to steal information, occasionally following them at high speed with no purpose. It doesn’t build to anything, but all of the sudden right when the movie needs a climax, he kidnaps someone.
After kidnapping Asastasia’s friend, the bad guy tells her to bring him five million dollars right away. I guess rich people always have that sort of cash lying around. Usually in million-dollar bills, or giant gold bitcoins. He warns her not to tell anyone. So, she doesn’t, because she’s a dumb asshole. She just goes to the bank and withdraws the dough. Banks get requests like that all the time and it never draws any suspicion.
When she brings the money alone to an abandoned warehouse (of course), Mr. Bad Guy slaps her so hard she must be hospitalized. But not before she shoots him in the kneecap. That serves as the culmination of a series of decisions by her and the filmmakers that are so fucking stupid it’s impossible to root for anyone.
As Anastasia is being wheeled into the hospital so she can have her slap looked at, Grey tells the medics, “Be careful; she’s pregnant.” I wonder if there is a version of the script where she wasn’t pregnant and he says, “Go ahead, drag her down the hall by her hair. It’s fine.”
Yes, she’s carrying Grey’s child. At first, he’s not happy about that because he thinks it means they won’t get to have as much sex. He doesn’t want a baby getting in the way of sexy time. And he doesn’t want to fuck his own baby in her womb with his penis.
He pouts with the all the pout power he can muster. What a catch he is, Anastasia!!! When he scolds her for her pregnancy, she explains to him, in exactly these words: “Babies happen when people have sex. And we tend to do that a lot!” I truly believe she needed to explain this to him, and maybe to some of the sweatered women in the audience, and definitely to all the incels who will watch this at home alone. Grey never exhibits the intelligence to understand the cause and effect of sex and babies on his own.
The good news is that her getting slapped really hard makes Grey realize he indeed does want a baby, and that they can convert the sex dungeon into a nursery. They just need to paint the whips a pastel color and put some giraffe and zebra appliques on the quilted red velvet walls. The restraints can keep the baby from crawling away. The butt plugs will be wonderful pacifiers.
Fifty Shades Freed essentially is a mixture of wealth porn and bad erotica in no logical order. Much of it goes nowhere, a tease that there is a horrific four-hour director’s cut out there somewhere that follows the lost and uninteresting threads. Grey buys a giant, secluded lake mansion for Ansatasia. They tour it and meet a sexy architect who wants to rebuild it. Then the mansion is forgotten for the rest of the movie. At another point, Anastasia’s friend thinks her boyfriend is cheating on her. We never get any indication otherwise, but it’s all forgotten when the potential cheater proposes.
I didn’t mind these threads being lost because I didn’t give a fuck. But neither did the people shitting out this colossal turd. I’m not sure they cared about anything other than butcher block counter tops and product placement for Audi.
There are too many damn shots of Dakota Johnson’s boobs. I like boobs. Check that: I LOVE BOOOBS, and these are fine examples, but I got bored, especially when they droop off such a shitty, droopy actress. What I thought was weird is that there are no dick shots, not even in shadow. This movie is meant for the ladies, so why not give them a thrill? Do cat ladies like boobs and not dicks? What about some toned male ass for the women who drive pickups with “Tight Butts Drive Me Nuts” bumper stickers?
One Finger for Fifty Shades Freed. This movie could use a shitload more one fingers. All of them diddling.