When Steven Soderbergh directed 2012’s Magic Mike, a largely downbeat fable in which economic hard times drive a hunky aspiring furniture-maker to earn his living as a stripper at a Tampa nightclub, neither he nor the movie’s star, Channing Tatum, could have known that, more than a decade later, that gritty little indie would have inspired a glitzy multimedia franchise. The years since have seen a hit sequel, the lighter-hearted and even more striptastic Magic Mike XXL (directed by Gregory Jacobs but written by the same screenwriter, Reid Carolin), and Magic Mike-inspired live stage shows in London, Las Vegas, and Miami, as well as a 2021 reality TV show, Finding Magic Mike. The Magic Mike ethos—unpretentious beefcake-ogling fun, oriented toward the straight female and gay male gaze—has become a successful international brand, which makes it fitting that the third Magic Mike movie, this time with Soderbergh back in the director’s chair, takes place mainly not in the grotty strip clubs of the American South but in a posh historic theater in London.
To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies. Despite Tatum’s undimmed charm as the easygoing, erotically gifted Mike, and despite the welcome presence of Salma Hayek Pinault as his client-turned-lover-turned-employer, this third outing suffers from an odd energy deficiency, as if it had already blown its metaphorical load. Soderbergh and Carolin seem to have misunderstood the most basic appeal of their own franchise: We come to Magic Mike movies to watch Channing Tatum and, if at all possible, his well-built buddies dance.
In one bravura early scene, Mike, working as a bartender at a fancy Miami house party, gives the hostess, Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (Hayek Pinault), a private lap dance that finds a new and raunchy use for seemingly every architectural element in her mansion. But after that we hardly see Tatum dance again until near the end of the movie, and then as only one brief (albeit gloriously kitschy) part of a much larger onstage spectacle. For most of its nearly two-hour running time, Magic Mike’s Last Dance keeps Tatum in the role not of performer but of impresario, casting and rehearsing a male-striptease show for the London theater that Max, a wealthy divorcée, has inherited as part of the property settlement.
The movie’s premise, considerably more slender than the broad torso of its hero, is that after a single night of contractual lap-dancing and non-contractual lovin’, Max has seen enough to know that Mike is the right man to help her get her personal and professional groove back by revamping the theater’s current production, a successful but starchy costume drama called Isabel Ascendant, into a no-holds-barred strip extravaganza. To do so they must recruit a team of talented male dancers from around the continent—cue a slickly edited audition montage full of eye-popping demonstrations of athleticism—and train them in the art of audience-pleasing sex-act simulation. (This includes a tutorial from Mike about obtaining consent from the female audience volunteers, set to Ro James’ “Permission”—a recreation of a number that has become a staple of live Magic Mike performances.) Mike and Max also run up against a succession of too-easily-surmounted obstacles, including the disapproval of a prim city bureaucrat (Vicki Pepperdine) who’s looking for any excuse to shut down the theater.
Meanwhile Mike, a working-class man of simple tastes, finds himself an uncomfortable houseguest at Max’s palatial London apartment, attended to by a seen-it-all butler (Ayub Khan Din). They also share quarters with Max’s deadpan teenage daughter Zadie (Jemelia George), who narrates the whole film in a voiceover that’s both distracting and obscurely disturbing: There’s something unseemly about an adolescent’s knowing voice popping up every 20 minutes or so to frame the story of her own mother’s sexual awakening, especially given that the script suggests more than once that Max has been a less than ideally involved parent. The early mother-daughter tension dissipates in the film’s second half without any real explanation, just as the awkwardness of Max’s and Mike’s relationship—is he a kept man? Is she using him in order to prove a point about her newfound independence to her snooty friends and condescending ex-husband?—fails to culminate in a cathartic confrontation.
Magic Mike XXL, an unabashed hangout movie, was enjoyable in large part because it cheerfully eschewed any conflict beyond “but will our show at the male-stripper convention really go over big?” But Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a drama in search of a problem, with a script that keeps hinting at tough challenges that never quite arise. The crew of stripper buds who road-tripped with Mike in the last movie—played with scruffy charm by Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash, and Adam Rodriguez—appear only once, in the grid of an overseas Zoom call, while the pack of newly recruited studs hired to put on the London show never emerge as characters with proper names, much less personalities. The amount of time the audience spends watching these dozen or so terpsichorean thirst traps gyrate and hump the floor might as well be spent at a nightclub watching the moves of total strangers, when what gave the first two movies their raffish appeal was the fact we knew something about the men behind the … well, behind very little other than a thong and a necktie, but there was a real guy there, someone with ambitions and predilections and a reason to keep dancing, even if it was just to make a gas-station cashier smile.
As Mike is preparing to give Max the shirt-free bump-and-grind business in that genuinely hot early scene, she tells him that there will be “no happy endings.” As it turns out, she is wrong both about that night (they do wind up having sex) and about the Magic Mike franchise. When we say goodbye to our stripper-turned-carpenter-turned-bartender-turned-showbiz-entrepreneur, he does seem to have found a way to turn his gifts as an erotic dancer, long a cause for professional and personal ambivalence, into a fulfilling future career. If that career consists, in effect, of managing a franchise that recycles Mike’s own greatest hits from the past (including a strip number choreographed for other, younger dancers to the series’ recurring anthem, Ginuwine’s “Pony”), maybe it’s an appropriate end for a movie that feels at times more like a teaser for a Magic Mike live show than like a proper standalone story. A more suitable finale for the franchise might have brought back his band of bare-assed brothers—for one last onstage grind, sure, but also for an oiled-up group hug.
