Spanks For The Memories

Year: 2018

Director: James Foley

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Kim Basinger

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

If that's not the best poster tagline you've ever seen, you've either seen a lot of posters or you have much better taste than I do. "Don't miss the climax" is precisely what this franchise needed, throwing caution to the wind and unabashedly embracing its status as frothy, sexy trash. Pretending to be anything else is futile and tedious. Of course, "pretending to be anything else" is exactly what the franchise loves to do, so let's not kid ourselves that Fifty Shades Freed was great, but props to whatever genius made that poster a reality.

Like, let's not kid ourselves about the reason people are watching these movies.

Fifty Shades Freed opens with the wedding of tenacious submissive Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and BDSM stalker-maniac Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), which is treated with all the gravity and care that the people who have waited years for this deserve: as a thirty-second montage during the opening credits. So now they're married, and boy oh boy does that not fix their problems!

Christian is still a control-freak who wants to punish her every time she disobeys an order (you know, like good husbands give). Anastasia still wants to live her own life in addition to fixing Christian (you know, like all good wives must do). And Anastasia's abusive former boss Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson) has somehow transformed from a vaguely sexy book editor into a Mission: Impossible villain and is doing everything in his considerable, inexplicable power to take down the Greys, including car chases, attempted kidnapping, and literally planting a bomb in Christian's file room.

Also, they argue a lot about whether or not they want to have a baby, because that's totally a conversation you should have two days after the wedding.

Is it just me, or are they getting married in front of President Obama's official portrait backdrop?

Just like Fifty Shades Darker, I do kind of love how the movie just throws you into the deep end of the plot, sink or swim. Don't remember that two-second scene where Ana pointed at a house while sailing to a Taylor Swift song? Don't remember the auction sequence that was sandwiched between Ben Wa ball sex scenes? Well f**k you, because they are major plot points now, and if you don't remember what happened, you clearly didn't spend enough money on the Fifty Shades franchise to deserve to know what's going on.

Unfortunately, that's just about the biggest compliment I can give to the film, and I'm not entirely convinced that a callous disregard for newcomers goes in the "pro" column for anybody but me. Sure, some of the (very few) good things about the franchise have continued on here, but they're considerably weaker this time around. For instance, Dakota Johnson is, as ever, the best thing about the movie. Although she almost exclusively is forced to interact with Jamie Dornan, whose powerful emotive vacuum leaches the shine off her talents, she still finds the opportunity to deliver the franchise's only genuine belly laugh (an embarrassed admission about the couple owning a pair of handcuffs during a tense moment).

And there are some campy moments that can be squeezed out of this sponge of a movie. I myself quite fancied the honeymoon sequence where, among the riches and elegance of Paris, Christian buys Ana a tacky charm bracelet. And I'm pretty sure a quick jet ski ride completes the franchise's bingo card of putting this couple on every form of transportation ever conceived by humanity. Also, the brazenly conspicuous way that pop songs are injected into the very tissue of this movie, at the expense of all dialogue and plot, is admirably mercenary.

I'm pretty sure you hear more words spoken by Ellie Goulding than by Anastasia Steele.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough camp here to generate more than a passing interest. It's enough that I never felt like the film was a slog at any particular point, but that's about the best I can say for it. Most of what's at play here is just plain bad-bad. The plotting, which has even more unpredictable, inscrutable, low-stakes melodrama than the previous film (which features a helicopter crash with absolutely no setup) and thus should be that much more delightful, is too dizzying and fragmented to be properly picked apart.

Plus, they've really doubled down on the sex here, which really also should have been a bonus, but the love scenes have historically been the least exciting thing about this all-too vanilla franchise. Sure, there are actual handcuffs in this one, which I don't think have actually appeared in the series thus far in spite of being on the cover of at least one of the books, but the artifacts in the massively appointed red room are just used as garnishes to frustratingly dull missionary sex. One gratuitously extensive scene involves ice cream being spooned onto body parts and achieves a remarkable kind of anti-eroticism that just turns the stomach. The only thing to recommend any of these scenes is that Christian Grey's ratty, nudity-obliterating sex jeans have basically become their own character in the most hilarious and faux-meaningful way ever.

But the sad fact remains that Dornan and Johnson have absolutely zero chemistry. It doesn't help that the film's overzealous casting director has given us both Tyler Hoechlin and Brant Daugherty in small roles, thus assuring that Jamie Dornan will literally never be the sexiest person in the frame. This is no slight on Dornan or his body, but just like Tom Cruise needs you to hire short people on set so he looks taller, you can't hide his light under the bushel of a former Teen Wolf.

So, yeah. Fifty Shades Freed is about as average as a big-budget kink picture can be, which makes it massively disappointing. This trilogy has wasted all its incredible potential to sink into trashy excess, and though between the three of them there is probably an 80-minute supercut of bad-good delights, there is no reason to watch any of these movies ever again.

TL;DR: Fifty Shades Freed has a ridiculous plot, certainly, but it's too focused on its boring sex to be a true camp classic.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1057
Reviews In This Series
Fifty Shades of Grey (Taylor-Johnson, 2015)
Fifty Shades Darker (Foley, 2017)
Fifty Shades Freed (Foley, 2018)

Spank You Very Much

Year: 2017

Director: James Foley

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Now that Fifty Shades Freed is swift approaching, there's no way I could let my blog ignore the bridge between that and Fifty Shades of Grey for one second longer. Although I wrote a brief snippet in sorta-praise of that second film back in February 2017, it was during the brief time that I wasn't writing full reviews for current releases. What a fool I was! Please allow me to rectify that with this belated, beloved review of Fifty Shades Darker, a film I have owned on DVD for some months now, because I am nothing if not a lunatic.

It's all part of the reason I'm so sexually irresistible.

So, Fifty Shades Darker is - obviously - a continuation of the massively popular mommy-porn fanfic lit phenomenon. We join our heroine, who was called Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) by some parents whose story must be far more interesting than that of their daughter considering their decision to commit to that name, as we left her: broken up with handsome millionaire BDSM-obssessed boyfriend Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). She immediately finds him back in her life, buying photos she modeled for so nobody else can look at her, forcing her to accept a gift of $24,000, giving her a laptop and phone then demanding she dream of him, and getting in the face of her sexy new boss at the book publishing agency, Jack (Eric Johnson) before literally just buying the company so he can be in charge of her career. You know, like good boyfriends do.

This is all literally in the first twenty minutes of a movie that inexplicably brushes the two hour mark.

Anyway guess what, they end up back together, although they struggle with the terms and boundaries of their new commitment. Anastasia wants a vanilla, normal relationship, but the audience demands some kinky-ass sex, so she wavers back and forth in her desires. Many road blocks to their relationship arrive, but the most important are the manipulative presence of his former sexual abuser Elena Lincoln (Kim Basinger) and the violent obsession of a former sub named Leila (Bella Heathcoate). Thus must Anastasia quite literally grapple with Christian's past, if she truly means to be with him.

And I don't know why she wouldn't. Just look at how pale and disinterested he is. Scrumptious.

One thing I like about Fifty Shades Darker is that it does not give a SH*T if you don't remember the first one. I certainly don't remember it nor do I wish to, but this movie just throws you right on into the deep end anyway. And why not? It's not like any of these characters or plot lines really matter.

And that's exactly why Darker is a marked improvement on the original. The franchise has finally started to lean into the fact that all it ever was and is supposed to be is unfettered trashiness. Don't come to these movies looking for plot or dynamic character arcs. Don't come to them for a reflection of realistic relationships or sexual mores (seriously, please don't do that). Come here for an exercise in melodramatic froth interspersed with some of the best-worst fake BDSM designed to appeal to Wisconsin housewives who want to be titillated but only just a little.

Fifty Shades Darker still doesn't quite fulfill the lurid, absurd promise that the books provide, but it's substantially closer to achieving that atmosphere, to the point that it ends up being a marginally enjoyable trash odyssey into heterosexual camp. 

And only a straight person could have picked out this outfit.

But you know me. I'll take a bad-good movie over a bad-boring one any day, and though Darker still has its fair share of tedious moments, there is plenty for a bad movie lover to feast upon, starting with the fact that every huge plot twist is cleared up in about two minutes of screen time, including HERE BE SPOILERS a major helicopter crash that comes out of literally nowhere and sees Christian casually walk back into his apartment with hardly a scratch in less time than it takes for them to remove each other's clothes. END SPOILERS The abortive drama is deliciously inane, and just keeps on lobbing softballs toward our heroes from out of left field.

Of course, it's not like we expected a script that is forced to include the straight-from-the-source lines "Laters, baby" and "you distract me with your kinky f*ckery" to be particularly on the ball about its dramatic developments. It's not great, but frankly it's fascinating, if only as an exercise in watching the bizarre sublimated desires of one fanfiction author playing out ten feet high with a fifty million dollar budget.

The filmmaking also seems to have endeavored to fail in such a thorough way that it fills in all the gaps where the script rises to the level of "competent." This movie is chock full of unmotivated cuts to exteriors in the middle of scenes, props that teleport into people's hands, and blocking that has a woman bring Ana a mug of tea which she promptly sets a flat eight feet away from her.

And may the movie gods bless the production designer who had the brilliant idea to put an inexplicable Chronicles of Riddick poster in Christian's childhood bedroom, an omnipresent touch during one particular sex scene that is grandly perplexing and amusing.

But, as always, there's at least one thing that propels this film from the depths of the blandly smutty muck, and that is Dakota Johnson. She isn't given a particular showcase like the contract scene in the previous film, but she's still pretty genuinely great in the role, instilling Anastasia with a sharp sense of humor that is in no way present on the page. She also strikes a terrific balance between the character's requisite shy, awkward side (the one that makes her relatable to the audience and also desirable to Christian's kinky f*ckery), and her burgeoning confidence. She's frankly exquisite in an early interaction with her new boss, where after a fumbled initial interaction, she settles into her skin when she starts to focus on work, her passion cutting the tension and allowing her to focus.

Of course, not even Meryl Streep could have handled some of the lines thrown her way, and she does stumble occasionally, especially when she must pretend to have any sort of chemistry with Jamie Dornan (in spite of their much-publicized mutual contempt). But Johnson continues to be the sparkling gem of this franchise, redeeming the most awful lows with surprising charm and magnetism.

And I've made it this far without really talking about the sex, but who am I kidding? It's what people are here for, and it is... fine. Christian literally never takes his jeans off, which is frankly disturbing, but they up the ante on the kinkiness to a certain, satisfying degree. Of course, it's not hard to hit a higher tier than the first film, which literally just shows some spanking and calls it a day. And any couples who are actually into BDSM will find this film so vanilla they'll get brain freeze. But still, there's not many Hollywood big budget feature films that have scenes which specifically and explicitly revolve around ben wa balls, so that's something at least.

I certainly wouldn't recommend this film to the discerning viewer, but if you're looking for a little fun with one author's unfiltered id, it's as close to a slam dunk as this franchise has gotten. I have my fingers crossed that Fifty Shades Freed doubles down on no-holds-barred sex and extravagantly idiotic plotting, and if it accomplishes that, it might just be a hands down camp classic.

TL;DR: Fifty Shades Darker improves on the original film by not taking itself quite as seriously, although it's still just as drama-free and pointless.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1332

Reviews In This Series

Fifty Shades of Grey (Taylor-Johnson, 2015)

Fifty Shades Darker (Foley, 2017)

Fifty Shades Freed (Foley, 2018)