A SEQUEL WITH HEART, PECS AND ABS
Channing Tatum returns bigger, buffer and better with Magic Mike XXL
Alone in his workshop one night, Mike Lane receives a visit from the muse. Though he’s still played by Channing Tatum, Mike is no longer the Magic Mike we met in the movie of that name a few years back. He’s an entrepreneur with a fledgling custom-furniture business. The dream that beguiled him in Magic Mike — to quit the stripping game and work with his hands instead of his abs and his glutes — has come true.
But then, as Mike burns the midnight oil amid T-squares and two-by-fours, he catches a beat from the music playing in the background and starts to move. As the saying doesn’t quite go: you can take the dude out of the dance, but you can’t take the dance out of the dude. And so the audience watching Magic Mike XXL, an outrageously entertaining sequel directed by Gregory Jacobs, is treated to a private, intimate performance, as Mike’s carpentry is turned into an athletic, erotic spectacle. The guy knows how to handle his tools.
Magic Mike, released in the summer of 2012, was a musical fable for a moment of economic anxiety. The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh and made for around US$7 million (24 million baht) — tip-jar money in today’s Hollywood — teased out the complicated relationships between ambition and exploitation, between hedonism and discipline, between the fake cops and firefighters who bare their bodies for cash and the women who shriek and spill their Champagne when that happens.
It may have been the subtlety of the film’s critique of contemporary social conditions that made it a hit or it may have been something else. In any case, success begets sequels, and the challenge facing Magic Mike XXL — similar to the one faced by Pitch Perfect 2 — is how to manage enlarged expectations while remaining true to the scrappy, modest authenticity of the original.
Rather than trying to replay the first episode and expand on its themes, this instalment tosses it all aside like a handyman’s tool belt and throws itself headlong into the intoxicating carnality of what is demurely called “male entertainment”. The plot is as flimsy as a G-string and thoroughly spoiler-proof. Mike reunites with some of his colleagues and after a brief explanation of why Matthew McConaughey and Cody Horn are not in this movie, the guys roll out of Tampa, Florida, and head to a big stripper gathering in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. That’s about it.
On the way, they look up some old friends; make some new ones; drop some E; smoke some weed and take off their shirts. Even though flabbier viewers (I’m speaking hypothetically here) might experience a twinge of envy or shame at the display of chiselled pecs and sculpted quads, the spirit of Magic Mike XXL is buoyant and inclusive. Mike and his colleagues — Tarzan (Kevin Nash), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), Ken (Matt Bomer) and Richie (Joe Manganiello) — are disciplined professionals, servants of Terpsichore on a quest to refine their art. One of the film’s storylines involves each dancer’s struggle to free himself from the clichés of exotic dancing and find a more personal style of choreography. Ken is a New Age healer. Tarzan is an aspiring painter. Tito and Richie are shy, romantic souls in turbocharged bodies.
Embedded in the glitter and flesh are ideas about the human body that could fuel a dozen gender-study dissertations. The guys are mostly straight, but to point out the homoerotic subtext of their friendship would be like discovering a red subtext on a fire engine. They find natural allies among cross-dressed nightclub performers and women who “work the pole”. At a beach party on the way to the big show, Mike befriends Zoe (Amber Heard), who is a possible romantic partner, a fellow artiste and a mirror image of who Mike was in the first movie. She wants to move away from stripping to concentrate on her photography and he offers solidarity, a morale boost and a spectacularly broad shoulder to cry on.
Magic Mike XXL boldly flouts pop-cultural conventional wisdom. It’s often said that an explanation of a joke can’t be funny and that the analysis of pornography is never sexy. But here is a coherent and rigorous theory of pleasure that is also an absolute blast.