Magic Mike’s Last Dance

1hr 52mins (15)

Channing Tatum’s stripper stages a lacklustre return ★★

The original Magic Mike (2012), inspired by its star Channing Tatum’s experiences as a teenage stripper in Florida, “pulsed with a certain seedy glamour” and was a box-office hit, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Now, after a “barely credible” second instalment, we have a third – and it’s dreadful. When we meet our “luckless” hero, he is approaching his 40th birthday and working as a barman in Miami, having seen his furniture business implode during the pandemic. Things begin to look up for Mike, however, when he meets a multimillionaire theatre owner (Salma Hayek) at a charity gala. After some “life-altering sex in her Florida mansion”, he accompanies her to London as her “well-oiled boy toy”, to direct a play at a stuffy West End theatre that turns out to be in sore need of a bunch of male strippers. The story is essentially “a gender-flipped Pretty Woman”, crudely welded to an “interminable megamix of the Magic Mike Live! stage show”. The results, you won’t be surprised to learn, are “not good”.

There is plenty wrong with this “cash-grab threequel”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in Metro. “The spray tans have more depth” than the characters, London is “hilariously caricatured”, and the script is “completely bananas”. Still, at times it “tickled my ‘so bad it’s good’ sweet spot”, and Tatum and Hayek are great fun to watch. If you just want “a giggle and a goggle at racks of sixpacks”, you could do worse. The plot is “as thin as a gold lamé thong”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman. But there are compensations. The dancing is as “outlandish” as you’d expect of a Magic Mike film, and director Steven Soderbergh ensures that it’s all very “stylishly done”.