Tatum’s stripper franchise stumbles in 3rd time around
The “Magic Mike” saga was a big bag of fun while it lasted. And it lasted up to — but not including — the third and maybe-final film in the series, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”
Director Steven Soderbergh has been on a remarkable, unpredictable roll for a long time. To be sure, the new “Magic Mike” movie doesn’t misfire in predictable or conventional ways. It delivers enough of the requisite abs/air-grinding/shirtlessness to divert die-hard fans of the franchise from the peculiar story. Like people care about the story, right? And yet people do, especially if the story feels off.
After the largely, agreeably plotless hangouts with Mike and company in “Magic Mike” (2012) and the Gregory Jacobsdirected “Magic Mike XXL” (2015), screenwriter Reid Carolin returns with a self-mythologizing narrative trading laughs for sincerity and then, all too early, sincerity for solemnity. Less fun, more heart was the idea, along with real hope for the emotional health and romantic wellbeing of the Channing Tatum character.
Flat broke at age 40, after his furniture business goes belly-up, Mike meets the fabulously wealthy Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault) while bartending her private charity event in Florida. In a matter of screen minutes, he’s back at her house (one of several; mainly she’s living in London, on the brink of divorce), gently placing her trembling hand on his untrembling abs. This is merely the prelude to a well-compensated good time, by way of the art of the dance.
Needless to say she will never be the same. Under a mutually agreed-upon no-sex clause, in a jiffy they’re jetting to London to embark on a mysterious project Max has cooking. At the West End playhouse owned by Max’s cheating husband, a hit revival of a moldy old (fictional) comedy of manners is about to be transformed into an outrageous strip show, courtesy of Mike’s magic touch as director.
Offstage, Max and Mike trade unblinking stares of love, though they’re both too cool to talk about it or act on it. Max’s teen daughter (Jemelia George), who narrates the film, knows what’s up, though.
The film becomes a tale of how Mike opens up as a human being and relays his own love story “told through dance.” The cross-promotional angle is pretty shameless: The stage show we see, eventually, steals liberally from Tatum’s “Magic Mike
Live” stage show, currently at the Hippodrome Casino in London, the Sahara in Las Vegas and other locales.
So yeah, it’s not an art form, though it’s oddly stuffy and suffocating compared to the looselimbed enjoyment of its predecessors. The main stumbling block is a simple one: We can’t fully invest in the central relationship as written. There’s not enough there, even though Tatum and Hayek Pinault make screen sense together. They’re both well-attuned to what their bodies have done for their careers, in good films and bad. And though Tatum’s calculatedly bashful way with dialogue feels awfully shticky here, he’s very much a movie star. (We’ve known that about Hayek Pinault for a long time.)
All the same, there’s a hollow ring to all the pointed lines about female empowerment and the stifling gender restrictions of old, symbolized by the drawing-room comedy the strip show is about to rip wide open. “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” might’ve worked better if it had fully embraced the mantle of 21st-century comedy of manners. As is, it’s tentative, wanly comic. As the Russian stripper Anton Chekhov showed us: Without the funny, the serious has a harder go of it.
MPA rating: R (for sexual material and language) Running time: 1:52
How to watch: In theaters