When he's too controlling, she tells him so. The emotional tension of " Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Fifty Shades Darker," where Anna has hesitations about submitting to his sexual tastes, is gone. 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. In an inadvertently entertaining moment, Anna instructs her team on a book's font size. 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. The lengths Hyde will go to to get revenge makes up just one of the many non-sexual plot-lines of "Fifty Shades Freed."Īnother aspect of the film is Anna's desire to have a life outside of her marriage. Security footage reveals the terrorist as Hyde ( Eric Johnson), Anna's former boss who sexually assaulted her at the first available opportunity. They are called back from their honeymoon because a bomb exploded in one of the "Grey Enterprises" warehouses. 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). "Fifty Shades Freed" starts with the wedding.
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.īut alas, this is not what we talk about when we talk about "Fifty Shades."Īt 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). James' books, an acceptance of all of the "symbols" making up the heterosexual status quo: diamond rings, marriage, house-hunting.
("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. 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. The problem is there's not enough sex and too much. 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.