Grin and bare it
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE
Cert 15 ★★ In cinemas now
The first Magic Mike film was a witty and mildly gritty drama based on lead actor Channing Tatum’s pre-hollywood career as a male stripper. The follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, went big on the raunchy dancing as Mike’s well-oiled team took a road trip to a kit-shedding convention.
And now we have Mike channelling the putting-on-a-show vibe of the Muppets, as he takes his mucky choreography to a London theatre.
If this really is Tatum’s final gyrate around the multiplexes, it’s something of an anti-climax. We catch up with Tatum’s Mike in Miami, eight years after he hung up his thong to enter the artisan furniture trade.
The pandemic ended that dream (after the previous film’s erotic workshop scene, my money was on a health and safety inspection), which is why the skint hunk is now serving drinks at a party for loaded Max (Salma Hayek Pinault).
But when she learns of Mike’s stripping past, she offers him cash for a final private dance. The film’s first routine is sultry and rather spectacular, with Mike hurling Max around her Grand Designs house like a sex doll. Smitten Max then whisks Mike away to London for a barely comprehensible scheme to transform a stuffy West End play into a strip show. Mike starts recruiting street dancers while taking in the capital’s tourist hotspots, a naff sequence that reminded me of Alan Partridge promoting the canalways of East Anglia. There wasn’t much of a plot in the last film either but it had intentional laughs, likeable characters, and that brilliant petrol-station dance involving an insecure hunk and a family bag of Wotsits. This surprisingly earnest threequel isn’t nearly cheesy enough.
‘‘ Loaded Max offers Magic Mike cash for one final private dance