Magic Mike's Last Dance: Trading Bump-and-Grind For a 'Pas-de-Don't' Finale
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C
Who would have imagined, when the first Magic Mike movie hit screens in 2012, that we’d be following the character for more than a decade? But here we are with Magic Mike’s Last Dance.
The trilogy was inspired by actor/dancer Channing Tatum’s real life experience working as a male stripper in Florida, and it was a collaboration between Tatum, screenwriter Reid Carolin, and director Steven Soderbergh.
That first is my favorite. It had surprising depth, being as much about the challenges facing Mike Lang and other young men in his orbit, in difficult economic times, as it was about the sexy dancing and the life and temptations of the clubs.
Tatum is not only a fantastically talented dancer, fluid and agile, drawing positive comparisons to the great Gene Kelly. He gave Mike an inner life, a complexity, that made him appealing, someone we wanted to know more about.
Soderbergh directed with an intimate, indie feel, without stifling the energy or sexiness of the dancing.
The second, directed by Gregory Jacobs, dropped the complexity, and played on much more conventional ideas about male strippers. Now comes what is meant to be the finale.
If, as the title suggests this really is it for Magic Mike, he deserved a better send off. That rich subtext has been made much more basic, and less interesting. On top of it, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is hampered by a laboured storyline and isn’t sure what it wants to be.
But there is Mike, looking like he hasn’t aged an hour in the last decade, nor eaten a single cookie. He’s as toned as he was a decade ago. Good looks aside, he is emerging from a rough time. It is post-pandemic Florida, and like many people Mike Lang’s had a business go bust. He’s broke and in debt, and working as a bartender.
He’s tending bar at an event at the home of wealthy socialite Maxandra Mendoza (Selma Hayek Pinault). She’s going through a marital break-up and as a result, has lost her verve, her mojo. One of her guests recognizes Mike from his dancing days and suggests Max hire him to do a private dance for her.
Max offers to pay him $6,000 for the performance, and after some hemming and hawing, (he doesn’t do that anymore!) he agrees. Thus, begins a sexy pas de deux, Magic Mike style, that ends up with the two of them in bed.
In the morning, Max is cheered up and inspired. She makes Mike a business proposition. She wants him to come with her to London, where she has a job for him. She won’t reveal the nature of it until they get there, but offers him enough money to make it worthwhile.
She moves Mike into her London home, house, where her ‘wiser than her years’ daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) also lives. They’re all attended by a valet/chauffeur Victor (Ayub Khan-Din), who has been around the family long enough to have seen it all.
As for the job? As part of the separation agreement Max is now the owner of an historic (a.k.a. old) theatre in London that has been in her husband’s family for years. The theatre has been running a stuffy Victorian play about a woman having to make a choice between two men, both inadequate in Max’s eyes. Max shuts the play down for a month, fires everyone, and announces that Mike will be taking over as director (surprise!), reimagining the play using dance to tell an updated version of the story. And that new story will be about female empowerment.
Despite Mike never having directed anything outside of strip clubs, they start looking for athletic and “boundary pushing” male dancers to pull together their cast, and then they get into the theatre and start to rewrite the play as they go.
Not much of what happens in the reimagining of the play makes sense, but we’re put through a series of scenes as if it did. And then there are the roadblocks thrown up by Max’s ex in-laws who are trying to shut it down based on various violations.
Clearly, the plot turns screwball, but the tone of the movie doesn’t follow. It plods along with improbable turns that get less interesting as we wait for the inevitable dance sequences.
So, what’s it all about? For sure there’s the idea of repressed desire. That’s been somewhat of a constant through the series, where the dancing bypasses the constraints of attitude or behaviour to open the body to enjoyment and pleasure etc.
To make sure that we get that, the movie has a narrator, who we later figure out is Zadie, expounding about dance as non-verbal human communication. That voice over pops up from time to time in the movie to restate the theme, whether we need it or not.
The central head-scratcher in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, is Max’s insistence that her reimagined play is about female empowerment, but seems defined by men dancing hip thrusting, ripping off their shirts, having women sit in chairs and rubbing up against them.
Tatum and Hayek Pinault are committed to their characters, but nothing really adds up to anything we didn’t expect.
We do get a final series of dance sequences that are energetic and skillful, and make the stage play look like the opening dance number at the Grammys.
The highlight, from a dance perspective, comes when Mike, who has insisted he will not dance, gets on the stage with a trained ballerina, for an intimate pas-de-deux in the faux rain.
The intimacy of that dance is a contrast to all the shirt ripping and hip thrusting, and maybe puts a wee bit of magic back into Mike’s story.
The rest is one big pas-de-don’t.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance, directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Reid Carolin, starring Tatum Channing and Salma Hayek Pinault. In theatres Friday, February 10.