Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third and final movie in the unlikely franchise about a male stripper from Florida, wastes no time getting to its point. The first lines of the movie reveal that Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane lost his custom furniture business – the raison d’être for his career as an exotic dancer – during the pandemic. He’s working as a bartender for rich parties where donors toss money at distant causes. Mike is a long way from the Xquisite, the seedy but beloved club of the first movie, nor the dimly lit sorority houses where he used to show up and undress as a cop. One former bachelorette party client recognizes him; she’s now a lawyer, and he’s a curious specimen from her past.
Within five minutes, Mike locks the door of an expensively glass-paneled room with Maxandra, Salma Hayek Pinault’s very rich, magenta-clad divorcee. Max has questions about his job; bartending, he explains, is “not really what I do”, an answer she parlays into a private dance complete with Tatum’s abs, several lifts and a sensual athletic feat involving a metal bookshelf. I was at a relatively staid, sober screening, and still the sequence drew titters from the crowd.
It’s a good time, something the rest of the film is explicitly if not always as successfully in service of. Magic Mike’s Last Dance, directed, like the first film, by Steven Soderbergh, has received mediocre reviews (though still topped the box office on Super Bowl weekend), which are fair, to a point. As the conclusion to a trilogy, the reframing of stripping as an elevated craft and calling is far from the original ethos of the project, based loosely on Tatum’s experience trying to make ends meet as a young dancer in Florida, nor the erotic exuberance of the expertly titled 2015 sequel Magic Mike XXL. This is knowingly not a thinking movie. It reads, accurately, as a version of the profitable, location-less live show adapted for a screen audience. (The plot, in a sentence: Maxandra whisks Mike to London to direct a more-dance, less-strip show to spite her ex-husband.) But as a film overtly devoted to female pleasure – a rare-enough concept for a single movie, let alone a series, especially in the sexless world of American franchise cinema – it delivers, more on guiltless spectacle than on anything else.
If you think about it, which you really don’t need to do to enjoy, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, penned by series screenwriter Reid Carolin, feels like the inevitable glossing up and professionalizing of the franchise’s darker beginnings. The original 2012 film was a surprisingly gritty and unglamorous story of Recession-era economic insecurity via the flashy, underseen profession of male stripping. Magic Mike’s Last Dance, with its Valentine’s tie-in romance between Mike and Max and his rags-to-riches career as a London stage director, has the trappings of a fairytale; the original Xquisite also provided a fantasy, then spent the rest of the film undermining it. The Tampa Kings, Mike’s team of dancers, literally pump up before their routines in unsexy locker rooms; a bank denies Mike a small business loan due to his low credit score, and a friend’s side hustle as a small-time ecstasy dealer wipes out Mike’s life savings.
Still, the dance routines – pitched specifically, as Matthew McConaughey’s lascivious club owner put it, as escapism for the underserved female clientele – were filmed with enough appreciation for beautiful bodies in motion and in service of pleasure as to launch two more films, hundreds of millions in box office receipts, a live show in Vegas and a tour. Mike may have insisted that his job “is what I do, but it’s not who I am”, but the audience appetite was for the striptease, delivered by Tatum’s reliable charm and acrobatic thrusting.
Magic Mike XXL, directed by longtime Soderbergh collaborator Gregory Jacobs (Soderbergh served as editor and cinematographer under pseudonyms), turned such enthusiasm into a point unto itself – the film, essentially a buddy road-trip comedy for the Tampa Kings’ (Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez and Kevin Nash) final show, has almost tauntingly low stakes. Mike’s furniture business is struggling, and the male stripping convention in Myrtle Beach is not their ideal gig, but the group embraced their role, as one character put it, as “healers” – or at least “male entertainers”. Manganiello’s Big Dick Richie stripped in a gas station just to make a grumpy attendant smile.
There are, unfortunately, no G-strings in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, which offers the most romanticized version of Mike’s former means to an end, now career. The final installment tries several different lanes – romcom, dance movie, heist flick (briefly), inflections of a romance novel, a YA bit and an almost too-meta reflection on a “strong female heroine” via the rewrite of a Madame Bovary-type play. As the former Bovary turned dance-show emcee Hannah (Juliette Motamed) asks her audience in the 35-minute show-within-a-movie (give the people what they want!) that ends the film: don’t women want “a little bit of everything, all of the time?”
There are drawbacks to this kitchen-sink attempt at a finale – Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s palpable chemistry fizzles into an underdeveloped, unconvincing romance, the voiceover by Maxandra’s droll, observant teenage daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) is odd at best, the all-pro dancer cast of Mike’s revue have no lines or character, just abs. But that doesn’t lessen the enjoyment. Magic Mike’s Last Dance may offer some surface-level ideas about female desire – intimacy, focus, a variety of men, service – but that is more than most blockbuster films are delivering. Magic Mike may not have started out as a franchise primarily aimed to turn women on, but given how infrequently that audience is genuinely and sensually catered to, it’s not disappointing that it turned out that way.
