Fifty Shades Freed Cast- Mark Kermode’s sentiment on actors

Full text transcript of Fifty Shades Freed review:

So Fifty Shades freed, which is the freed, freed after. Yes, as in not in freed. I’m not sure I could cope with that. Fifty Shades trade. Yes. So I mean, a little bit of history just to put this in context. So the novel, the novels began life as a piece of online Twilight fan fiction. And the first Fifty Shades film was directed by Santilli Johnson, who really sort of struggled to make a silk purse out of the tinny at source. But she she kind of worked quite hard to make it work. The script ended up being written by Kelly Marcel, but there was famously a point at which she had got Patrick Marber in to do rewrites on it. And then Patrick Marber, his ideas were thrown out by E.L. James and they had to stick to what James had written. Patrick Marber was then interviewed on the radio, very graciously said, look, you know, it’s her creation is Neil James’s creation. I’m not going to complain about the fact that what she did was she defended her creation. But what she what then happened was that it became much more something that was kind of controlled by L. James in the next to issue. So essentially, we lost the interesting director, the potentially interesting writer, and they brought in both James Foley. Now, Foley is an interesting case because in the past he has made films like After Dark. My Suite, which is I think is a really good piece of work fare, which is kind of a straight to video erotic thriller, but dressed up as, you know, something a little bit different. And, you know, Glengarry Glen Ross, he’s somebody who has done interesting work in the past, but he was brought on as a safe pair of hands.

And the script duties were given to Leonard, who, of course, is his partner, who was basically doing exactly what was required by my as the original writer of the books and is the overseeing producer of the film. So total control exerted from the top. This is how it’s going to be. And James Foley just, you know, holding the holding the wheel as a as a safe pair of hands. So the second film where is there was some interesting stuff in the film. I didn’t think it was great and it was terrible. I mean, it was certainly when the whole thing about, you know, it’s about S.A.M., except it isn’t. I mean, if you look at a film like Bobbit Schroder’s, my Trias or even if it ended up making you think of the, you know, the glory days of nine and a half weeks. And it reminded me, of course, because Kim Basinger was involved in the series and of course, that there was at one point a more difficult version of nine 1/2 weeks that ended up being cut back because audiences didn’t want it to be challenging. They just wanted to be Mickey Rourke throwing the contents of his fridge at Kim Basinger. And that was as far as they were willing to go. So now we get to the third installment and the first one, you know, Christian was a dangerous, bad boy because dangerous, bad boy, the second one, he was kind of running in becoming the perfect man. Now, in the third one, they’ve got married and they were attempting to set up home with Anastasiya in the driving seat. Yeah.

It is geia, right, and I’m sure you’re very good at what you do. Otherwise, Christian wouldn’t have asked for your input. But please stop speaking to my husband as if I weren’t here and. I have designed many prestige projects, you may call me Mrs. Gray, and this is not a prestige project. This is going to be our home. So if you want this job, I suggest you start making eyes at my husband and keep your hands to yourself. Look, I’m sorry, Mrs. Gray, but I would never.

It won’t happen again.

Everything OK? Yeah, we were just discussing an alternative approach, something less in your face.

More respectful now, I haven’t seen this film, but you kind of have my guess is that she does carry on. No, no, no, she doesn’t, because she she she’s basically should be more at the beginning of the film. But basically what it is, is, you know, Anastasiya making her own rules. And if the character arc of the of the story would be her finding her feet, her asserting her identity while he goes through a series of fairly unbelievable connections to end up in a place that, you know, they both consensually want to be. So the problem with it is this firstly, I mean, it’s really not very good, but that doesn’t kind of matter because it has an inbuilt audience. And I’ve had so many, you know, cinema managers tell me, you know, believe me, the film opens, it packs out and it packs out with a larger framework out of which you are not one of the I’m absolutely not the core audience for this. And I don’t quite understand the amount of vitriol and anger it inspires because it’s very, very bland in this third installment, something that sort of nominally an erotic thriller goes more for the thriller. But I mean, there’s car chases. I mean, rubbish car chases, but car chases, there’s, you know, scheming, plotting going on in the background. It comes much closer to that kind of plot that you would have had from a straight to video erotic thriller or even the, you know, a pull the Hovan movie, although people would never director movie that was this bland. Was this completely to do with surfaces? All the stuff that’s really happening in terms of the erotica is to do with the possessions.

It’s to do with the cars. It’s to do with the jet plane. She’s constantly looking around and going, wow, what you own that? You own this, you own him, you whether you want everything you want. And so it becomes completely a sort of lifestyle, aspirational lifestyle achievement thing. I mean, funnily enough, if you compare that central couple with the central couple in Loveless, you’d have to say that, you know, from an aspirational point of view, they both want the same things. All the same stuff is very much in the background. He’s very much vanilla, is very much just kind of, you know, experimental side dressing. It’s no longer the center of the story. The center of the story is now become something that much closer, approximate to Thriller. And it’s not thrilling. The dialogue is very is very terrible. And the problem, therefore, is that the actors have to wrestle with very terrible dialogue. And again, I think it’s not fair to say, for example, you know, Jamie Daum is kind of, you know, uninspiring in that central role because Jamie Dimon is wrestling with lines which no one should have to wrestle with. And Dakota Johnson does as decent a job as its possible to do with those lines. And we’ve seen her in loads of other films in which she’s, you know, perfectly fine and good and interesting. So it just felt terribly corporate, pretty dull, some really skull scraping, bad dialogue, but lots of visual sort of pop video surface sheen, something approaching character progression, but not really.

I mean, I don’t for one minute believe in any of these people, any of these situations, any of the allegedly erotic tension between them. I just don’t believe in any of it. What it looks like is like somebody taking a book and then doing a TV version of the book. And if that’s what you want, that’s what it is. And it will play completely to its core audience. I mean, I do think the core audience will feel slightly like, OK, we have been from a from a if you’re a film fan, all the interest what interest there was was in the first film because it was you know, it was interesting to see Sam Tyler Johnson and Kelly, Marcel and James, you know, making this thing was then so enormously successful. And you could feel, at least in that first film, that Sam Tyler Johnson was trying to do something. But by the time you got to it, once it was over to James Foley, Foley is so much in the back seat that there is no evidence of the stuff that he’s done in the past. It now looks like absolutely televised pop video, you know, material gains stuff. Is that with the ropes? I hope so. I mean, yes, I think I think they I think yeah, I think that’s it. I think it’s I think it’s all done. But I would say once again, I don’t get people being angry or furious about it. It’s not terrible. It’s just.