The “Magic Mike” saga was a big bag of fun while it lasted. And it lasted up to — but not including — the third and maybe-final film in the series, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”
That’s a frustrating state of affairs. Director Steven Soderbergh has been on a remarkable, unpredictable roll for a long time now. To be sure, the new “Magic Mike” movie doesn’t misfire in predictable or conventional ways. It delivers enough of the requisite abs / air-grinding / shirtlessness / thirstiness to divert die-hard fans of the franchise from the peculiar story. Like people care about the story, right? And yet people do, especially if the story that’s there feels off.
After the largely, agreeably plotless hangouts with Mike and company in “Magic Mike” (2012) and the Gregory Jacobs-directed “Magic Mike XXL” (2015), screenwriter Reid Carolin returns with a self-mythologizing narrative trading laughs for sincerity and then, all too early, sincerity for solemnity. Less fun, more heart was the idea, along with real hope for the emotional health and romantic well-being of the Channing Tatum character.
Tricky word, “hope.” Soderbergh knows that movies, sometimes his own, have a way of appeasing a popular audience with just enough of it to leaven his sardonic, ironic acumen. As a punchline to his ripping state-of-cinema speech delivered in San Francisco in 2013, Soderbergh deadpanned that any screenplay pitched to a roomful of bored, clueless studio executives has a chance at being greenlit if you say that your movie, whatever it’s about, is really about hope. He takes his own advice to heart on “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”
Flat broke at 40, after his furniture business goes belly-up in the pandemic, Mike meets the fabulously wealthy Maxandra (Salma Hayek) while bartending her private charity event in Florida. In a matter of screen minutes, he’s back at her house (one of several; mainly she’s living in London, on the brink of divorce), gently placing her trembling hand on his untrembling abs. This is merely the prelude to a well-compensated good time, by way of the art of the dance. Mike is, in fact, the Lord of this kind of Dance.
Needless to say she will never be the same, after all that astonishingly well-rehearsed tenderness. Under a mutually agreed-upon no-sex clause, in a jiffy they’re jetting to London to embark on a mysterious project Max has cooking. Which is? This part’s a bit knotty: At the West End playhouse owned by Max’s cheating husband, a hit revival of a moldy old (fictional) comedy of manners is about to be transformed into an outrageous strip show, courtesy of Mike’s magic touch as director.
Offstage, Max and Mike trade unblinking stares of love, though they’re both too cool to talk about it or act on it. Max’s teenage daughter (Jemelia George) knows what’s up, though. It is this character who narrates the film as if reading from a term paper on the history, meaning and evergreen allure of dance through the ages.
Mike is just the working-class American Joe these insufferable Brits need. The film becomes a tale of how he opens up as a human being and relays his own love story “told through dance,” as the narration points out with a yellow highlighter. The cross-promotional angle is pretty shameless with this sequel: The stage show we see, eventually, once the swiveling Vari-Lights get going, steals liberally from Tatum’s own “Magic Mike Live” stage show, currently bumping and grinding at the Hippodrome Casino in London, the Sahara in Las Vegas and other locales.
So yeah, it’s not an art form, though it’s oddly stuffy and suffocating compared to the loose-limbed enjoyment of its predecessors. The main stumbling block is a simple one: We can’t fully invest in the central, push/pull relationship as written. There’s not enough there, even though Tatum and Hayek make screen sense together. They’re both well-attuned to what their bodies have done for their careers, in good films and bad. And though Tatum’s calculatedly bashful way with dialogue feels awfully shticky here, he’s very much a movie star. (We’ve known that about Hayek for a good long time.)
All the same, there’s a hollow ring to all the pointed lines about female empowerment and the stifling gender restrictions of old, symbolized by the drawing-room comedy the strip show is about to rip wide open. “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” might’ve worked better if it had fully embraced the mantle of 21st-century comedy of manners. As is, it’s tentative, wanly comic. As the great Russian stripper Anton Chekhov showed us: Without the funny, the serious has a harder go of it.
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‘MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE’
2 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for sexual material and language)
Running time: 1:52
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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