Magic Mike’s Last Dance

Alright, let’s talk about the evolution of the Magic Mike franchise. The original film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was a deceptively dark, even tragic look at the lives of a group of male strippers who party hard and get hit by the Great Recession even harder. It’s about the American Dream, it’s about addiction, it’s about finding out Channing Tatum is freakishly athletic. Three years later, Soderbergh handed off the directorial reins to Magic Mike’s assistant director Gregory Jacobs for Magic Mike XXL, a feature-length chill session with the bros that ditches any semblance of conflict to deliver a liberating, radically joyful vision of masculinity.

Now Soderbergh returns as director to inject eroticism back into the multiplex with a sort of “Magic Mike’s European Vacation.” Splitting the difference between the tightly structured drama of the original and the looser, feel-good energy of the sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance continues to embody the series’ central thesis that a lap dance has the power to change lives. 

This time around, Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane is lured out of retirement by wealthy theater owner Max Mendoza (Salma Hayek), who flies him to London to direct a theatrical production of his striptease routine starring an Ocean’s Eleven-style group of the most talented strippers in the western world. If that sounds suspiciously like a 110-minute ad for the real Magic Mike stage show, which itself debuted in London in 2018, that’s because it is. This is pretty openly a fictionalized Magic Mike Live origin story, and because of that most of the dance numbers are performed by Channing’s ragtag squad of strippers rather than by Channing himself, who with two notable exceptions is here as a rom-com lead rather than as a dancer. Disappointing as that may be for the Tatum-heads in the audience, it hardly ends up mattering by the time we reach the main event: a nearly half-hour sequence of showstopper striptease choreo capped off by the titular last dance that successfully bridges the gap between Swan Lake and Hustlers. If it all ends up feeling like a backpedal from the ambition of XXL, it’s only a baby step in the wrong direction: in a decidedly sexless era of American cinema, Steven Soderbergh is still the only man brave enough to deliver proudly horny movies to the public. R, 112 min.

Wide release in theaters

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