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magic mike's last dance.jpeg

'Magic Mike's Last Dance' Refuses to Drop Its Damn Pants

By Jason Adams | Film | February 10, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | February 10, 2023 |


magic mike's last dance.jpeg

I know this may shock some of you, but if you squint real hard you might be able to make out a couple—just a couple, mind you!—of differences between Channing Tatum and me. Not physically, of course! I’ve had buns of steel since pre-pubescence. And our dazzling wits and loose effervescent charms—well those too; they’re also about roughly the same. Roughly. But if you slapped a telescope to each of your eyes and you really strained hard for it I think you’d realize that Channing Tatum and I are not actually the same person. Sorry to bust up your dreams, folks, but it’s true. And Jesus wept.

Nowhere is that truth more self-evident than it is with Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper trilogy-capper out this weekend, which sees Mr. Tatum returning to the flaunt-it fold as the magical man himself Mike Lane, whose thong-based exploits we’ve previously watched ponying themselves across 2012’s Magic Mike and 2015’s franchise highlight Magic Mike XXL. Here’s where me and Channing split ways, to be precise to the finest of points—I personally think there should maybe be some male stripping in my male stripper movies?

To say there’s “zero” stripping in Magic Mike’s Last Dance is admittedly a whisper of an overstatement. The story goes that this film only got made because Tatum invited Soderbergh to see the live Magic Mike show that he produces, and Soderbergh felt so inspired by what he saw that he just had to return to the directing seat after skipping the middle film. Last Dance very much feels like a feature-length commercial for that in-person theatrical experience. But as I’ve long suspected about Magic Mike Live, the stage show in question—that ain’t for me, brah.

I don’t want to slide too far down the pole of gendered generalities here, but I feel as if I have been shown enough cause to say that Magic Mike Live is a show made for women. Its mission statement is very much about empowering ladies to indulge their fantasies and be sexually forthright, none of which I have any issue with, I promise you. As Shania opined, “Let’s go, girls.” And who am I to argue with Shania? And when Andie McDowell’s “glass slipper” won herself Joe Manganiello’s “Big Dick Richie” in XXL, I cheered right there alongside you all. That’s a feminism we can all believe in! But my mind just boggles a bit at the apparent fact, if this movie and that stage show are to be believed, that the actual removal of clothing seems to be very, very far down a female audience’s list of requirements from a male stripping show? If Last Dance is indeed indicative you’ll see more skin in an Abercrombie store doorway during Christmas time.

I’ve seen complaints from many of my gay male compatriots over how each one of these movies sidelines the stripping in favor of, you know, the not stripping—we are admittedly a flesh-loving bunch, we gay males! But that’s not an issue I’ve personally had with any of the movies before this one because there was so much fun to be had with Mike’s fellow strip-bros, perhaps the greatest goofy pack of loveable himbos ever put on-screen. But Last Dance lances all that fat—which is to say all of that sweaty writhing zero-percent body fat—replacing it instead with a thin rom-com duet between Mike and a mid-divorce billionairess delightfully named Maxandra Mendoza, who is delightfully played by Salma Hayek.

Salma’s not the film’s problem; Salma is terrific. Her chemistry with Tatum is terrific. The film’s great highlight is its opening scene, where Maxandra buys a private dance from her cater-waiter Mike (whose furniture design business belly-flopped thanks to the pandemic)—as a short film, a Magic Mike 2.5, we’d all be raving about that 20-minute movie.

The hour and a half that follows that sequence though, hoo boy. More than any of the previous films (even XXL, which had a last act that nodded a little in this direction) this is very much Soderbergh’s attempt at a Busby Berkeley “Let’s put on a show!” kind of movie, where a gathering of oddballs fight off the odds to stage their dream, right down to the scowling government officials who burst in and try to shut things down at the last minute. The problem here is—where the hell is my cast of oddballs then?

We don’t get to know any of the dancers beyond glances at their signature swivels. That they’re all real dancers from Magic Mike Live might’ve presented Soderbergh with some actorly limitations on that front, but he’s not exactly a director who’s never managed to wring mild feats of thesp prowess from unprofessionals before—see Bubble. (No really, you should see Bubble.) We stop occasionally to watch a whisper of the show itself as it comes together here and there in fits and thrusts, but none of that is terribly riveting, or fun, or god forbid sexy. The men never get more than shirtless! When we do see the show come together, someone reaches over to cover the eyes of Maxandra’s teen daughter and I couldn’t figure out why—a pair of pecs are displayed? That’s the extent of risqué now that we must shield our impressionable children from? What in the Fundamentalist nonsense???

Soderbergh has gone on the record saying that with this one he really wanted to push the idea of sensuality over the vulgarity of skin, and I do get what he was going for with this conceptual edging since it does work so very well right there in the movie’s opening sequence. But there’s pay-off there, and eventually a little bit of skin too. (But just a little!) The problem with the rest of the film is that, save the sparks between Salma and Chan, everything studiously avoids paying off its accrued debts. There’s no sweaty cash bulging out of this movie’s thong once it hits backstage because it never drops its damn pants in the first place.