Strip stakes
If you think this is Magic Mike’s last dance, I have news for you. “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” which was helmed by original “Magic Mike” director Steven Soderbergh, is better than expected. By “better,” I mean it was not agony to sit through. I didn’t cover my eyes or stick my fingers in my ears. I even had fun. This time around former stripper Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) has been brought low by the pandemic economy. Working as a bartender at a charity event in Florida hosted by super-rich Maxandra Mendoza (Selma Hayek, replacing Thandiwe Newton). “Max” lives in London, owns many properties and is in the middle of a contentious divorce.
Screenwriter Reid Carolin, who penned both the original 2012 film and its 2015 sequel (and produced the TV series), wastes no time getting Max into a chair in her mansion having her “life changed” by the lap-dancing ministrations of magical stripperhealer Mike. A voice (Who is it?) tells us that “the instinct to dance” was primeval and still is. Mike and Max touch one another, rub against each other, undress one another, slide around floor and furniture. Mike lifts Max up to the windows. He swings from them. The next day, Max decides to take Mike to London and get him a new career. As it happens she owns a London theater named the Rattigan, and she wants to cancel the stuffy production running there and install amateur Mike as the choreographer and director of a new show that they will (Why not?) write together to spite her soon-to-be ex-husband (Alan Cox). Also on the scene in London is Max’s insolent, sharp-tongued, highly intelligent teenage daughter Zadie (Jemelia George, who also narrates) and the London mansion’s Alfred-like butler Victor (Ayub Khan-Din).
Thus, Carolin and Soderbergh turn this three-quel in the spirit of old Hollywood into a movie about “putting on a show” with Hayek and Tatum in the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney roles. This means lots of montages of male street dancers in London. Max is flying in a young Italian dancer, whose routine is a cross between a martial arts demonstration, a hot yoga session and a ballet. Mike decides to build out the stage of the small theater. This is a violation of the code. He gets around it by arranging for his dancers to perform for the mousy head of the theater board on a London — wait for it — bus. In a FaceTime session, Mike speaks to his old buddies, including the unnamable Richie (Joe Manganiello), who complains that he is now “glorified arm candy” (Manganiello is married to little dog lover Sofia Vergara BTW). Someone actually refers to the show as “the zombie apocalypse of repressed desire.” Max insists dubiously that the show is not about male sex organs. No matter how much the theater is altered, the final result resembles a strip club putting on a production of “Rent.”
The thinness of the script of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is offset by the professionalism and chemistry of Tatum and Hayek. In some scenes, they summon the ghost of Noel Coward and his dotty collection of rich, cheating, sexually repressed eccentrics. Hayek, who is beautiful, unimaginably rich and multi-lingual, is practically a Coward character at this point. Tatum can still charm and retains the formidable dance skills. We get a “Singin’ in the Rain” allusion and a strong sense that the specter of Patrick Swayze of “Dirty Dancing” also hovers happily nearby. Keep on dancing.
(“Magic Mike’s Last Dance” contains sexually suggestive material and profanity)