Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third and final movie in the unlikely franchise about a male stripper from Florida, wastes no time getting to its point. The first lines of the movie reveal that Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane lost his custom furniture business – the raison d’être for his career as an exotic dancer – during the pandemic. He’s working as a bartender for rich parties where donors toss money at distant causes. Mike is a long way from the Xquisite, the seedy but beloved club of the first movie, nor the dimly lit sorority houses where he used to show up and undress as a cop. One former bachelorette party client recognizes him; she’s now a lawyer, and he’s a curious specimen from her past.
Within five minutes, Mike locks the door of an expensively glass-paneled room with Maxandra, Salma Hayek Pinault’s very rich, magenta-clad divorcee. Max has questions about his job; bartending, he explains, is “not really what I do”, an answer she parlays into a private dance complete with Tatum’s abs, several lifts and a sensual athletic feat involving a metal bookshelf. I was at a relatively staid, sober screening, and still the sequence drew titters from the crowd.
