The magic is gone.
Not just from the name of the guy shouldering the franchise – the hunky, golden-hearted ex-stripper played by Channing Tatum, approaching middle age, just goes by Mike Lane now – but from the franchise itself.
A full decade has elapsed since our hero spent his nights working the stage as one of the Kings of Tampa (as chronicled in volume one) and seven years since the gloriously gratuitous bro-down that was Magic Mike XXL.
Long out of the stripping game but still more buffed than Ginuwine's saddle, Mike returns for what is – nominally – his final dry-hump routine. (You shouldn't necessarily believe Steven Soderbergh, who's back in the director's seat after ceding it to Gregory Jacobs for XXL, when he says something's over: His retirement from filmmaking, announced in 2012, lasted all of several months.)
But there's nary a gold or silver or star-spangled thong in sight. Mike has subbed out such fripperies for sober boyleg briefs in his titular "last dance", which takes place on a heritage-listed London stage – by some metrics, about as far away as you can get from the Florida strip clubs and convention centres that were once his domain.
Mike has been spirited away from Miami and bartending gigs (apparently, his custom furniture business fell victim to COVID) on the whim of one Maxandra Mendoza, a wildly rich divorcee-in-waiting with a pent-up sultry streak courtesy of Salma Hayek Pinault.
So inspiring is the lap dance that Max convinces Mike to give her, his close-range pelvic thrusting functioning as a kind of CPR for the soul, that she contrives to hire him – not as a male entertainer, but as a director: His mandate is to spice up the stuffy period piece that's running at the theatre once owned by her media mogul husband, which she shotgunned in the split. Apparently, what the play needs is a bunch of semi-clad male dancers.
Soderbergh's comment that Last Dance is a riff on All That Jazz, Bob Fosse's harrowing self-portrait-as-backstage-musical, jars with the utter flimsiness of the production Mike eventually concocts.
Where both Magic Mike and XXL rooted their bump-and-grind spectacle in the bromance between the Kings of Tampa, with a love interest for Mike handled perfunctorily, as pretty much just a plot device, Last Dance centres the sexual tension between Tatum and co-star Hayek Pinault, while the Kings (Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, and Kevin Nash) are confined to a glitchy few minutes on Zoom.
This redistribution of narrative weight is the film's attempt – made boringly explicit via the discussion around reconstructing the stage show – to offer some more robust on-screen representation to the women who make up the greatest part of the MM fanbase. It's an understandable gesture – I'd hazard a guess that neither of the first two films would pass the Bechdel test – but one that works against the particular strengths of this franchise.
The idea of a woman's pleasure as something vital is baked into its very premise, and always treated as something sacred, something inspiring, even when Soderbergh or Jacobs lean into the inherent goofiness of the old sexy cop and fireman routines.
It is a truth I would've thought was universally acknowledged that a film's ability to empower women doesn't hinge on the depiction of a woman literally talking about how important it is to be empowered. More than the actual subject matter on screen, appealing to the 'female gaze' comes down to a question of how it's framed.
The first two Magic Mikes are gorgeous, musclebound illustrations of this idea: They invite the real-life audience members, whatever their gender or orientation, to position themselves amongst the crowd of gleeful, blushing ladies often on the screen, stuffing dollar bills into the G-string of the nearest spray-tanned specimen. (It's the inverse of the mechanism by which heterosexual porn, and, historically, much of mainstream cinema, works to align the viewer with the male protagonist.)
Last Dance, however, seems to have lost confidence in this vision, and so delivers something that is altogether more didactic and less joyful.
Mind you, I wouldn't be litigating this issue were the chemistry between Hayek Pinault and Tatum sparkier, or the film's scattered set pieces anywhere in the realm of show-stopping.
Mike's initial lap dance for Max, which finds the pair pressed up against multiple tabletops and glass doors in her Miami manse, is about as steamy as things get, and even that sequence feels like it's working too hard to sell viewers on too little, given what's come before. The double-decker bus flash-mob routine performed by Mike's new dancers – none of whom have a name, let alone a story arc – to charm a mild-mannered bureaucrat is an insult to Big Dick Richie and his impromptu gas station gyrations in XXL.
The sheer London of it all is partly to blame. Who thought it was a good idea to transplant this sweaty, sleazy-but-sweet franchise to a city famous for being grey, rainy, and uptight? (Let's not even get into the Big-Ben-plus-beefeater-teddy-bear montage that heralds the new location. Soderbergh, who also shot and edited the film, is apparently feeling incredibly lazy after last year's taut Rear Window switch-up, Kimi.)
Instead of bringing out Tatum's gentle jock charisma, fish-out-of-water-style, the setting deadens it: He keeps saying that he doesn't want to dance, but he doesn't exactly seem invigorated by the idea of directing either. Yes, he looks very chic in his monotone new designer threads, courtesy of Max, but who wants chic when magic was supposed to be on the menu?
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that Last Dance was actually engineered to disappoint: When Pony finally drops – Mike's signature song, and the soundtrack to electrifying sequences in each of the previous films – our main man is busy backstage. The members of his troupe, meanwhile, duly dispatch a routine that's barely raunchier than something you'd get from your standard boy band, who would've at least worn cooler outfits.
"No happy endings," Max warns Mike during negotiations for that fateful lap dance. Turns out she needn't have worried.
Magic Mike's Last Dance is in cinemas now.
