By Caryn JamesFeatures correspondent
Warner BrosWhile Channing Tatum is charismatic, and there are a few flashes of wit in the script, the latest Magic Mike sequel is 'tepid', writes Caryn James.
Over a decade ago in Magic Mike, Channing Tatum made his character the most gleeful, wholesome stripper on Earth. That not-so-secret goal is right there in a television ad for the new sequel, Magic Mike's Last Dance, with a line that reads: "Take the guilty out of pleasure." Leaving aside the murky question of who feels guilty about what, the formula concocted by Tatum and the director, Steven Soderbergh, took the sleaze out of stripping, and added a take-it-or-leave it undercurrent of social mobility. That surprise hit had many critics analysing Mike's ambition to use his stripper money to start his own custom furniture business, while audiences – women and men – were left free to gaze at the vision of hunky guys taking their clothes off in glossy, acrobatically choreographed routines. Drug deals had consequences, but sex was a freewheeling choice, and there was no hint of exploitation in the places where Mike danced.
The third instalment in the series, after Magic Mike XXL (2015), Last Dance lands in a different world, one in which Tatum is a major star, and the character is a marketable commodity with Magic Mike Live stage shows in Las Vegas and London. The disappointing new film feels like a product. It loses its gleefulness, and leans into the plot – never the franchise's strength – with an unbelievable romance and a half-baked message of female empowerment. The dances are mostly fragmented scenes of men breakdancing or leaping through the air then tearing off their shirts. No thongs, though. These wholesome strippers keep their pants on.
The story had to bring Mike down so he can climb the ladder again. Now the pandemic has caused his furniture business to fail, and he's bartending in Miami when he meets a rich about-to-be-divorced woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). Misinformed about his current profession, she convinces him to give her an innocent lap dance, no sex involved. What follows is an incredible, choregraphed set piece, a montage of Mike writhing and grinding, Maxandra on the floor, on a table, lifted against the window, sex without actual sex. The old-fashioned word might be sultry, or you can just call it hot.
But after that ramped-up sexiness, the film takes a long slide down. Maxandra whisks Mike off to London on her private jet with a business proposition and a plan for a theatre she owns: replace a stuffy, 19th-Century drawing-room drama called Isabel Ascendant with a one-night-only stage extravaganza. Mike will direct the male dancers. That leads to a let's-put-on-a-show sincerity that clashes with the film's sometimes winking tone and double entendres.
Magic Mike's Last Dance
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault
Film length: 1hr 52m
Giving a voice to women in the new film has been a talking point for Tatum. And it's a neat reversal from the usual gender roles that Maxandra has the money and the power. Too bad they didn't give Hayek Pinault a character along with a string of feminist pronouncements. Maxandra says more than once – in case we missed the point? – that Mike's lap dance reminded her who she really is. And she wonders why Isabel in the play has to choose between a loveless marriage for money and being a social outcast. Why can't a woman be free? Those are good ideas to live by but horrible as movie dialogue. And while the story teases a connection between Maxandra and Mike, there is no chemistry between the actors after the first dance.
Tatum is as charismatic as ever, and the script gives him a few flashes of wit. Rehearsing the dancers, he tells them to prepare for "a zombie apocalypse of repressed desire" from the audience. But the goofiness that was part of Mike's appeal is gone.
Magic Mike XXL coasted on the charm of the original, with a different director. But along with Reid Carolin, who wrote all three instalments, Soderbergh returns to direct Last Dance. His usual crisp style and pace only occasionally emerge here. There are uncharacteristically flabby touches, including a montage of dancers auditioning intercut with shots of Maxandra and Mike scouting street performers and looking like they're in some clichéd London travel show. When Mike leads his rehearsals, Soderbergh's camera swirls around a lap dance in a visceral, cinematic way. When we see the final live show, though, we have no sense of why it might be dynamic on a stage.
The theme of wealth and power is dropped for long stretches only to surface at the end with the trite idea that money doesn't matter. Really? After all that? This tepid film proves that Tatum still has great moves, but that even Mike, magical though he was, can't dance forever.
★★★☆☆
Magic Mike's Last Dance is released worldwide from 10 February.
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