Mike Lane is now a bartender. His custom-furniture company went belly up during the pandemic, and so there he is, mixing drinks at a swanky Miami charity event, when he meets Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault), an embattled London socialite on the verge of a messy divorce. She could use some distraction, and Mike, she learns, happens to have one up his sleeve, among other soon-to-be-divested pieces of clothing. After some coaxing and negotiating, plus a little soul searching, he gives Maxandra what starts as a private lap dance and soon morphs into a hypnotic home-gymnastics routine, complete with bars and beams (mainly hers), if also one hell of a tricky dismount. Maxandra, floored by Mike’s passion and artistry, isn’t ready to let him slink away.
Clearly, Hollywood isn’t either. “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is the third feature about a Florida stripper played by a perfectly cast Channing Tatum, and its title — which could be interpreted as a death knell for the franchise or for Mike himself (don’t worry, he lives) — is best understood as the continuation of a series-long joke. From the moment we first met him more than a decade ago, Mike has been what you might call an unenthusiastic ecdysiast, forever on the verge of retiring his thong-and-dance routine. His abundant gifts — for shaking his hips, baring his abs and sending the ladies and more than a few gentlemen into paroxysms of pleasure — were matched only by his apparent desire to be doing anything else for a living.
That made him something of a reluctant hero for our times, though one of the revelations of this unexpectedly elastic series is that every era gets the “Magic Mike” movie it deserves. The first one, as directed by Steven Soderbergh, mixed playful fantasy with a chaser of hard reality; it was both a sly showcase for Mike’s attributes and a jaundiced snapshot of a tough post-recession moment. The exuberantly entertaining “Magic Mike XXL” (2015), made by Gregory Jacobs (with Soderbergh serving as cinematographer and editor), was a blast of pure, unfiltered pleasure, one that reflected the broader, more variegated appetites of the moviegoing public.
