Channing Tatum’s buff character “Magic” Mike Lane, stripper and hunky sex-positive recipient of the thirsty female gaze, is back again for this goofy, but hastily packaged and oddly anti-climactic threequel from director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin.
As the US emerges from the Covid pandemic, Mike has fallen on hard times. He is approaching his 40th birthday (but looking well on it), a business he set up has failed and now he’s working as a barman. Yet, while good-humouredly serving drinks at a fancy charity gala in Miami, there is a connection between him and socialite-hostess Max Mendoza (Salma Hayek). Simmeringly sexy Max hears from one of her guests – this is Kim, played by Caitlin Gerard, a veteran of the first Magic Mike movie from 2012 – that Mike used to be a red-hot dancer and so Max asks him for a private show. Mike obliges in a sizzler of a quasi-sex-scene, and infatuated Max brings Mike over to London with her to direct and choreograph an oiled-up male dance show in the grand theatre she has gained from her soon-to-be-ex-husband in the divorce proceedings.
