Compared to 2015 Magic Mike XXLSteven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, was a box office hit. The third Magic Mike film is intended to be the final installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a heart of gold, a side business in carpentry, and a thoroughly explored philosophy about female pleasure. But unlike the previous Magic Mike films, the film never garnered a following or became the focus of online discussion.
This is due to the eight-year gap between the last film and this one. is to blame Difficulty getting people to watch movies in cinemas. Or more precisely: The endless problems of the film itself are to blame. But for some reason the film hardly made a splash when it hit theaters in February 2023.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance is now streaming on Max, the platform it was originally made for. Like every film that gets streamed, it now has a new chance to find an audience. But Max’s release probably won’t do much, given what a daunting, calculated, and half-hearted project it is. To be honest, there’s only one scene Magic Mike’s Last Dance This is really worth seeing, at least for fans of the previous films, and it comes at the beginning of the film.
For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital tenants), the sequence begins about eight minutes later, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is called to a meeting with his current employer, a rich, bored woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID has brought Mike’s carpentry business to a halt, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering company Maxandra hires for her latest fundraising gig. Depressed about her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from one of Mike’s exes that he was doing a “silly dance” that might cheer her up. She is willing to offer him $6,000 for a private show.
Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore – but lured by the money and annoyed by the description of the “silly dance”, he changes his mind, cleaning the surfaces of Maxandra’s house of potted plants and knick-knacks and giving her a solo performance he doesn’t like . I’m not even trying to pose as anything other than a highly theatrical, film-only foreplay.
In fact, the scene is a “silly dance,” but it’s the only part of the film that really feels like the films before it – especially so Magic Mike XXL, with his lengthy lectures (some in poetic form delivered by Donald Glover) on the sacredness of fulfilling female fantasies. Mike first pulls up his shirt and puts Maxandra’s hand on his abdominal muscles as if they had healing powers. He then climbs over her and her furniture and invites her to a lap dance in which he carries her around, buries his face in her crotch, pulls up on her knick-knack shelves while she takes his pants off, and crawls across a table on all fours with her under him, pushing her along the surface with his groin.
It’s all a little hilarious. It’s also kind of sexy for those who are able to accept the fantasy sold in it, if only because both performers have the physical strength and grace to pull off such moves. And last but not least, it is a prerequisite for immersion in the world Generally funny interviews
The rest of the film is just a descent, starting with the shot immediately after the dance sequence where it becomes clear that Mike and Maxandra followed their fake sex with real sex. Which is fine, except from then on the audience is prompted to believe that Mike has fallen in love with Maxandra and will do whatever it takes to stay in a relationship with her despite her erratic, manipulative, dishonest, abusive and above all written so superficially and irregularly that it is difficult to see the appeal. Mainly because Mike himself seems to be more of a prop than a presence for most of the film. The carpentry work that shaped him Magic Mike is gone. The friends who defined him Magic Mike XXL have been disregarded save for a quick Zoom check-in to confirm they exist. His philosophizing about his role in the world is over. The only thing that defines him in this film is his romance with Maxandra – which is inexplicably framed and narrated by Maxandra’s prickly teenage daughter in artfully poetic, nonsensical language.
More importantly, the film was explicitly aimed at conveying real life Magic Mike Live stage show, and it gives the main characters fairly minimal and uninteresting storylines while focusing on their efforts to produce a similar strip performance. The big climax of the film is a lengthy dance performance by a group of new cast members, most of whom don’t even know character names, let alone personalities. (Fair note: Other Polygon viewers enjoyed it better than I did. If you’re ok with the lack of action or detail for this sequence and just want spectacle, staging, and a bunch of muscular guys taking their shirts off, it’ll start short before the 88-minute mark.)
Tatum dances again in this sequence and the choreography is captivating – he and his dance partner Kylie Shea, who is also never given a character name, slide across the wet stage together. But there’s no indication what’s at stake, other than whether Mike and Maxandra’s underdeveloped, awkward relationship will continue or if they will split after the show.
That’s what makes streaming fun, though – viewers can hop in and out as they please and focus on the fun parts without getting bogged down in the boring parts. You can also look around for something more fun after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic show is over. The original Magic Mike And Magic Mike XXL is also available on Max – as well as on Netflix and on many digital rental platforms.