<em>Fifty Shades Freed</em>: A Spoilereview

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).

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, , it is eminently deserving, , , and .) 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.