An explosive, spectacular mess that you’ll love
Magic Mike’s Last Dance (M, 112min) Directed by Steven Soderbergh
★★★1⁄2
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
Iam the only person in the cinema at least a few times a year. One of my favourite places in Wellington to see a film is in the southern suburbs – and they seem to think there’s a market for 10am screenings of new releases.
I’m not convinced they’re right. But I’m always happy to turn up and have the entire place to myself for a couple of hours.
But tonight, for the first time ever, I got to be the only male in an audience.
The occasion was a Ladies Night preview session of Magic Mike’s Last Dance.
The venue was a multiplex in Porirua, north of Wellington. And I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance is the final act – probably – in a sequence of films that I don’t believe were ever intended to be a trilogy. Magic Mike, in 2012, was a surprise smash hit that even picked up a fair bit of critical acclaim.
The film was famously based on star Channing Tatum’s own experiences as a teenager, working as a stripper in Florida. Magic Mike had some grit, an engrossing couple of character arcs and enough kickass dance sequences to send any audience home happy. Tatum did plenty here to get away from the pack and become a bona fide star, and Matthew McConaughey handed in one of the first roles that broke him out of rom-com hell and into serious films.
The second film – Magic Mike XXL – made a pile of money for everyone concerned, but didn’t have anything like the character and narrative smarts of the original.
Which brings us to tonight, with me and a roomful of whooping and cheering women, as Magic Mike’s Last Dance did its work.
Last Dance is a very different film to the first two. If anything, I’d probably call it a romantic comedy, or even a relationship drama. The story finds Mike, post-pandemic, broke and struggling to pay his bills – gigging as a bartender at a fundraiser being held by Maxandra – Max – a stratospherically rich woman who, naturally, Mike has never heard of. But when he is summoned by her to ‘‘do one of his dances’’ – for a good amount of cash – Mike delivers. And the very next day he is on a private jet to London, having been promised some sort of job for the next month by his newfound playmate.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance unfolds as a kind of inverted My Fair Lady or Pretty Woman, with Tatum’s Mike as the streetsmart ingenue, being introduced to a cast of financial heavy hitters and theatre types, including Max’s ex-husband, who seems to be taking his arrival quite jolly well, thank you very much.
Max’s plan for Mike is to have him take over as director of the numbingly tedious Regency-era play she has inherited – and to reinvent it as an all-dancing, all-female-empowerment showcase for the best damn troupe of male dancers Mike can assemble from all over Europe.
And if that sounds to you like a shameless contrivance to hang a film on, then you’d get no argument from me.
The truth is, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a bit of a mess. But with Tatum and a very game Salma Hayek Pinault in the leads – and a support cast of strong British comedy performers, the ramshackle plotting is at least in safe hands.
And the dance sequences – there’s plenty of chests, but no nudity – are explosive and spectacular in a way that few dance films have been for years.
As a celebration of dance – and as a blunt reminder that asking for permission and consent is still the very sexiest thing that anyone can do, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a pile of fun. It wasn’t the film I was expecting to see. But in many ways it was a better film than I could have hoped for.
❚ Magic Mike’s Last Dance is now screening in cinemas nationwide.