Dir: James Foley; Starring: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Rita Ora, Luke Grimes, Victor Rasuk, Marcia Gay Harden, Jennifer Ehle, Ariel Kebbel. 18 cert, 105 mins.

Unlike the first two instalments of EL James’s gauzy softcore trilogy, Fifty Shades Freed was not screened in advance anywhere in the UK. So in order to see it, your intrepid critic made a 16 hour round trip to Paris, where the film opened on Wednesday in the driving snow, in order to send back advance word that, yes, it is somehow even ropier than the second one.

The French title, Cinquante Nuances Plus Claires, has a certain purring mystique that at felt quite promising, but as far as nuances on screen were concerned, I counted zero. This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

Anyway, this time in the continuing adventures of Nancy Macbook and Spanky the Damaged Billionaire: following the stalker mystery and helicopter crash of Fifty Shades Darker, the film rejoins our drama-prone couple on the morning of their wedding, when things seem to have calmed down somewhat, at least for a bit.

In place of the emotional stage-setting another film might waste its time on, there is instead a lengthy getting-ready montage, with drooling close-ups of Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) slipping into her lacy gown while her husband-to-be Christian (Jamie Dornan) fastens his cufflinks, which look like two enormous platinum Chewits.