Certificate: 15 (strong sex references, language). Running Time: 110 mins. UK Distributor: Warner Bros.
WHO’S IN IT?
Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan Din, Jemelia George, Juliette Motamed, Vicki Pepperdine, Gavin Spokes, Caitlin Gerard, Christopher Bencomo, Alan Cox
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Steven Soderbergh (director), Reid Carolin (writer, producer), Gregory Jacobs, Peter Kiernan, Channing Tatum and Nick Wechsler (producers), Peter Andrews (cinematographer), Mary Ann Bernard (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Former male stripper “Magic” Mike Lane (Tatum) gets an intriguing new opportunity…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE?
In 2012’s Magic Mike, Channing Tatum introduced the world to a brand-new phenomenon based loosely on his own experiences as a male stripper, which director Steven Soderbergh helped to keep firmly grounded and surprisingly gritty while still, for the most part, giving the predominantly female audience what they wanted to see. Then, in the 2015 sequel Magic Mike XXL, Tatum and his buddies just decided to have a laugh and do some hunky dancing along the way, which new director Gregory Jacobs livened up with a touch of silliness and general fun.
Now, in 2023, Tatum and returning director Soderbergh attempt to fuse together these two wildly different tones – the grittiness of the first, and the all-out insanity of the second – in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the intended capper to this particular trilogy, sending off Tatum’s “Magic” Mike Lane off in style. Unfortunately, the fusing manages to produce some surprisingly tepid results, turning it into a film that is wildly unsure of itself, and most crucially lacking the consistent entertainment factor of either previous entry.
Right away, we are told – via some incredibly clunky narration that is sadly present throughout the whole film – that Tatum’s Mike has left the world of male stripping behind for good, but also that is currently working as a bartender after his furniture business got swallowed up in the pandemic. At one gig, he encounters wealthy socialite Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault) who, after seeing what Mike can/used to do, immediately invites him to London where she intends to put on a brand-new male revue show at a West End theatre owned by her estranged husband Roger (Alan Cox), with Mike as its director and choreographer. Mike and Maxandra then spend most of the movie working together to put on the mother of all shows, hiring dancers all across the town and finding some exhilarating new moves to dazzle the audience with.
In a nutshell, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is the Rocky V of male stripper movies – and that’s not a good thing. As something that is intended to wrap up Mike Lane’s story, the film feels oddly unsatisfactory in developing or even finding new dimensions to this character, who remains one-note throughout and doesn’t even have any personal stakes that drive the story. In the previous two films, even the far less plot-driven Magic Mike XXL, there was always something driving this character or at the very least giving him goals to pursue, whereas here he’s mostly there at the behest of his rich new client, who’s more than a bit unstable and slightly irresponsible with her resources, but he just goes along with it all because, if he did otherwise, there wouldn’t be a movie. Tatum himself seems a little less energetic than he has been before in the role, and more often than not comes off as bland because of it, although the couple of times he does get to dance (making that title only slightly accurate) prevents me from thinking that he’s completely sleepwalking through, because the dude can still erotically dance like there’s no tomorrow.
It’s also films like this that leave me frustrated by Soderbergh as a director, because while every now and then he can come out with a winner – including most recently with his compelling Hitchcock thriller Kimi – he can also make a lot of movies with little life outside of some occasionally experimental filmmaking techniques. Magic Mike’s Last Dance is one of the latter, but he doesn’t even have his experimental expertise to hide behind, because like Tatum he brings shockingly low energy to a routinely made film with unambitious cinematography and editing (both of which Soderbergh also provides, under separate pseudonyms), as though he’s perhaps only there to fill a contractual obligation. His sparkless take here also makes the central relationship between Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s characters hard to convince, because the two actors have little chemistry that not even their natural charm can bring to life, and their motivations (or, in Tatum’s case, their lack of) keep flip-flopping from one thing to the other that, ultimately, you just don’t care about either of them.
Like I said earlier, the film’s biggest failure is to try and combine the grittiness of the first film with the silliness of the second, except that neither of them fully work when placed together. There will be scenes where Tatum and Hayek Pinault in arguments with one another that get pretty raw at times, only for them to be followed by scenes with a stereotypically snooty butler (Ayub Khan Din) who you’d only see in straight-up comedies about rich people. One key sequence starts out fairly suspenseful, with the theatre being threatened with closure due to planning complications, but the way in which it is solved (I won’t say how, but it involves a stuffy bureaucrat and a bus) is laughably cartoonish, and tonally almost like it’s from a completely different universe. The previous movies worked because they recognised their own tones and stuck with them through and through, but this one is trying to have its cake and do a lap dance on it too, leaving it with no discernible identity that feels authentic or believable enough to sustain itself.
The movie only truly comes alive during its final act, where we get to see the actual show that Tatum has spent the whole movie putting together. It’s a fun experience, and no doubt an advertisement for the Magic Mike Live revue show that’s now playing up in London’s Leicester Square (this movie even features a lot of the dancers from that show), but it gets the audience going and contains some very out-there ideas that it almost rivals the infamously bonkers Satan’s Alley show from the notorious Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive. If the rest of the movie had been just as lively to watch, then maybe Magic Mike’s Last Dance wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment – sadly, this is one dance that you can happily skip out on.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a disappointing conclusion to the Magic Mike trilogy, which attempts to fuse the grittiness of the first with the anything-goes attitude of the second, but hardly provides anything worthy of its own accord due to some unambitious direction and often bland performances, which not even the occasional spark of life can prevent from capping things off with a flat misstep.
