fifty shades freed
It’s every woman’s fantasy: lose your virginity to a super-handsome billionaire who constantly takes you on ‘surprise’ trips in his private jet/helicopter/yacht, marry him, have kids, and shoot an evil villain along the way. “I can’t believe I shot somebody!” marvels dead-eyed Dakota Johnson, deep into the duly-dire Fifty Shades Freed, as if giggling about her wild new nail polish shade or lamenting having one too many Cosmopolitans the night before.
In 2017’s astonishingly-terrible Fifty Shades Darker, no one seemed to think much when Jamie Dornan’s super-handsome billionaire —Christian Grey, character as boring as his name— survived a helicopter crash in the wilderness. And, here, shooting the psychopath out to destroy your life in an elaborate act of ridiculous revenge is no big deal, either.
Those who haven’t seen any of the Fifty Shades trilogy —cinema’s definitive popcorn-movie shrine to tepid simulated softcore— may be wondering why, exactly, films that’re supposed to be about navigating a sub-dom/abusive/way-moneyed relationship are filled with helicopter crashes and shootouts. The answer is pretty simple: in the absence of having something —anything— to say, they turn to genre clichés to gin up some drama, and pad out the run-time.
In the poorly-imagined ‘world’ of author E.L. James, everything is going to work out great in the end. But the conflicts along the way —be they of relationship-drama or action-movie trope— show an absence of imagination and critical thinking, let alone understanding of human behaviour or exploration of gender politics.
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The general dramatic micro-arcs of these Fifty Shades movies go like this: our heroine, Anastasia Steele (lulz4∞), does something like not answer her phone, go out for a drink, talk to another person, exist as sexualised being for anyone other than he betrothed beau, or accidentally get pregnant. In response, he shows up in her apartment, at her workplace (where she has unironically fucked her way to the top), in the DMs of the under-surveillance phone he gave her, and yells that she’s “defying” him, that she’s disobedient, that she has behaved in some unforgivable way that enflames his horrifying possessiveness and jealousy. They have an argument, often whilst Dornan is shirtless. Then, they have dull, lifeless, utterly-unerotic make-up sex involving such hardcore S&M acts as wearing a blindfold or having braided hair; either before or after Dornan has surprised his always-surprised gal, whisking her away for some witless 1%-er fantasy bullshit like staying in a villa or buying a mansion or staging an extended advertisement for an automobile (that even looks exactly like an extended advertisement for an automobile).
Dornan is female-fantasy —handsome, rich, shirtless; waiting to be tamed and willing to change for the right woman— written as possessive, abusive, bullying, buying-of-others, ever-controlling creep. At the end of Fifty Shades Freed, when Johnson’s Steele (tee hee) offers, of him, “you treat people well”, it’s hard not to laugh at the utter lack of awareness, in both character and writer. He treats people terribly; but, that’s okay, he’s rich.
Watching these two actors who clearly hate each other phoning in the lobotomised dialogue and pantomiming the ’80s-erotic-thriller-worthy sex scenes is dull beyond belief. And, so, enter Eric Johnson, aka Dr. Motherfuckin’ Gallinger from The Knick, as a furious former-boss of our heroine; a villain who, it also turns out, grew up alongside ol’ Christian Grey in foster homes on the mean streets of Detroit. Dual axes to doubly grind! This Time, It’s Twice As Personal! There’s endless scenes in which our Mr & Mrs Grey Power Couple consult with their security about how they’re going to deal with this madman, but the best moments are when it becomes some kind of cop-movie, get-me-everything-you’ve-got-on-him! stylez. In response, one bodyguard brings a dossier on who Gallinger is, only it appears to just be a print-out of his LinkedIn profile.
Eventually, Gallinger (or, if we must “Jack Hyde, Ana’s former boss and main antagonist”) tails our couple on car-chases, breaks into houses, wield knives, gets outta jail, kidnaps a helpless dame, demands ransom, and draws everyone to a big finale at a disused warehouse. And, then, gets shot for his troubles. But, once he does, everything is fixed, all problems are solved, a clip-show montage of Fifty Shades ‘memories’ plays, and a so-heteronormative-it-hurts life of raising-towheaded-kids-in-obscene-wealth lingers for our generically-attractive leading couple. It’s a veritable Happily Ever After for what’s a fairytale for those short on ambition and long on regressive-social-values; the obligatory ending for a series about fucking that’s been fucked from the start.
the cloverfield paradox
It was a work of cinematic marketing genius: take a terrible sci-fi blockbuster initially made for the multiplexes and, rather than dumping it, for a loss, in some lull in the release-schedule, ‘surprise drop’ it on a streaming-service on American football's night-of-nights, with no trailer or pre-release promotional buildup. This is how The Cloverfield Paradox had its moment in the sun, commandeering the cultural conversation for that brief moment between its out-of-nowhere announcement and people actually seeing it and realising it’s garbage.
And garbage it is: in a dystopian future of dwindling energy resources, an international crew heads into space to try and use a particle accelerator to fashion a new form of energy. What results is a riff on parallel-realities, in which the crew comes under attack by its own ship and/or bad CGI (“Logic doesn’t apply to any of this!” says Zhang Ziyi, who speaks in subtitled Mandarin that the rest of the cast intuitively understand; thus proving her own point), and entry-level emotional-manipulation is played out by lead Gugu Mbatha-Raw having a husband and kids back home.
Of course, audiences will be grateful for even that mildest instance of basic characterisation. The other members of the starry cast —Zhang, Daniel Brühl, David Oyelowo, Chris O’Dowd, John Ortiz, Aksel Hennie, Elizabeth Debicki— don't even get that; each effectively a blank slate whose identity is captured in the flags stitched onto their jumpsuits.
They squabble, they evoke their countries back home, they turn on each other, and then things go wrong; which is great for people who love blown-hatches. Director Julius Onah makes things as blatant, obvious, and overplayed as possible: the colours lurid, the pace rattling along, the utterly-generic score blasting away. For a shit-goes-wrong-on-a-space-station movie, he fails to deliver even the most basic tenet of the genre —the slow build-up of tension— instead galloping through the moments in which the actors are knocked off, one by one (Quoth Oyelowo: “this dimension is eating us alive!”). Compared to even something like last year’s Alien-knockoff Life, it seems poorly-judged and utterly uninspired.
As a cut-rate straight-to-streaming genre pic, it ain’t good. But tying it to the Cloverfield brand —which, after 10 Cloverfield Lane, now just seems like a home for unrelated spec-scripts— makes The Cloverfield Paradox seem even worse. Not just because of how its many failures are thrown into stark relief when compared to the 2008 found-footage-monster-movie original, but, also, because of the dire final act in which they try and make those ties more twist-endingly literal.
