Magic Mikes Last Dance (Movie)

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    Magic Mike Is Just Trying to Pay the Bills

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    Forget getting ahead in America. The stripper at the heart of the film trilogy is working frantically not to lose his shirt.The first thing you learn about Mike Lane, played by Channing Tatum and otherwise known as Magic Mike, in the new movie “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is that his dream has died. The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed his custom furniture business, his raison d’être beyond stripping in the first two movies. Now Mike is working for a catering service, serving drinks to wealthy people who donate to causes they don’t even care to learn about.The “Magic Mike” movies are about impeccable abs, female pleasure, male friendship and the power of a great lap dance. But just beneath all the joy of gyrating hips lurks economic anxiety. “Magic Mike” has always been about money, and not just the dollar bills that are slipped into G-strings.With “Last Dance,” opening Friday, Tatum, the director Steven Soderbergh, the writer Reid Carolin and their collaborators have created a trilogy that’s sneakily about the last decade or so in American instability. What started as a (mostly) realistic portrait of stripper life in the wake of the Great Recession has evolved into a fantasy for the days of Covid-related financial strife, in which Mike is rescued from his economic travails by a rich almost-divorcée (Salma Hayek Pinault) who sees his talent and whisks him away to London to direct a show.Maxandra and Mike (Salma Hayek Pinault and Tatum) each have financial worries in the new film.Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.Sure, it’s a lot of rom-com escapism, but it also has real-world resonance. Mike saw the one thing he worked for crumble. Now he gets a way out, and the kind of happy ending for which many long. Even then, the specter of monetary worries still lingers.When the first “Magic Mike” arrived in 2012, the story was irresistible: With his movie career heading into overdrive, Tatum was starring in a film based on his own pre-Hollywood experiences as a dancer in a male revue. The movie, set in Tampa, Fla., drew audiences looking for “hot boys,” but the story within was more melancholy than the squeal-inducing imagery of ripped dudes in goofy, barely there costumes suggested.As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, the film “is also very much an inquiry into capitalism and its woes.” In The Atlantic, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that the dancers “reveal the naked truth about the recession.” She explained, “These strippers are marginally employed men trying to move up the economic ladder in a state with the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country.”The Return of ‘Magic Mike’The seductive stripper saga is back with “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Channing Tatum.‘Magic Mike’: Our critic called the original 2012 film “an inquiry into capitalism and its woes, which means that, like them, it’s also about movies.”‘Magic Mike XXL’: The 2015 sequel faced the challenge of managing enlarged expectations while remaining true to the authenticity of the original.Gay Audience: There was nothing explicitly gay about the plot, but gay men flocked to “Magic Mike” in large numbers after its debut. Here is what some viewers said.A Classic Movie Dance: In “Magic Mike XXL,” Richie, played by Joe Manganiello, performs a prop-heavy routine with just the right touch of desperation and awkward vulnerability.The deeper concerns of “Magic Mike” shouldn’t have been a surprise. Soderbergh is known for flitting among genres, but whether he’s making sleek heist movies, uncomfortably real thrillers or dramas based on actual events, he’s always interested in power structures and how they affect the people in his lens.Though the Great Recession was technically over by the time “Magic Mike” was released, you can feel its aftermath coursing through the screenplay. In the most devastating scene, Mike is refused a bank loan to open a furniture business because of his low credit score. The loan officer (Betsy Brandt) tells him, “We do offer relief programs for our qualified distressed candidates.” His flirty demeanor drops. “I read the papers,” he replies. “The only thing that’s distressed is y’all.”But it’s not just that one moment: The feeling of trying to understand a system that has failed you permeates the movie. Dallas, the slick M.C. portrayed by Matthew McConaughey, says that he would not send his hypothetical child to school. Instead he would make the kid watch Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” all day and “get him into Ameritrade.” It’s a grim-sounding attempt to win a game that’s not worth playing.A bank loan is just out of reach for Magic Mike in the first film.Warner Bros.By “Magic Mike XXL” (2015), directed by Soderbergh’s frequent assistant director, Gregory Jacobs, the economy had bounced back and Mike’s furniture company, if not thriving, was up and running. He couldn’t pay for health insurance for his one employee, but he was doing what he loved — other than dancing, that is. His passion for the latter draws him back to his pals from the Xquisite club, who are planning a road trip to Myrtle Beach for a male stripper convention as one final hurrah before they leave the life behind.The question of what these guys will do once that one night is over hovers over the action. Tito (Adam Rodriguez), for instance, wants to make artisanal frozen yogurt but will end up slinging snow cones at a mall. Still, the movie — which is the most outright fun of the bunch — has a twinkly-eyed Obama-era optimism. It ends with the crew watching July Fourth fireworks as the DJ Khaled song “All I Do Is Win” plays.The purportedly final movie of the saga opens with a British-accented voice-over that treats Mike as an anthropological subject to be explored. Dance, it says, could not save Mike’s furniture company from the effects of the pandemic, thus forcing him to return to service work in Florida.Later, we learn that the disembodied voice belongs to the awkward teen daughter of Maxandra, Hayek Pinault’s character, writing a novel about Mike that includes some intellectual posturing about the history of dance. Still, her dialogue speaks to that underlying interest that has always been a part of this franchise: Mike is representative of an Everyman’s struggle to stay afloat.In those initial minutes the audience is made to feel his exhaustion as he returns to the kind of odd jobs he thought he had left behind. The independence that he had as a small-business owner is gone, and he is now forced to respond as stuck-up lackeys bark orders at him. At a party he is helping cater, he is recognized by a woman named Kim (Caitlin Gerard), who turns out to be a screaming college student he danced for in the first movie. Now she’s a successful lawyer, and he’s behind a bar, his past something for her to titter about as she walks away. Their dynamic has shifted. Kim tells Maxandra about Mike’s former profession, and Maxandra, in need of a release, offers him an obscene amount of cash for one dance.Through the sensuous choreography, their chemistry is undeniable, and when she coaxes him to travel overseas with her for a mysterious project, he goes along with the proposition, having nothing to lose. In fact, the one time we see his buddies from the first two films, they are on a video call and Mike owes them money. Max, meanwhile, is also negotiating her relationship to her wealth, which could disappear in a flash with her breakup. Mike is her knight in shining armor, helping her get revenge on her wayward spouse, but she is also his, rescuing him from pandemic depression.It would be easy to look at “Last Dance” as just that: a love story set against the backdrop of a production that looks a lot like the “Magic Mike Live” stage shows that Tatum, Soderbergh and Carolin have taken out on tour in the real world. And it is. But it’s also the creators’ version of a conclusion to Mike’s journey that offers him a respite from the troubles that plague a working-class striver like him. Yes, it’s a bit magical, but, after all, this is “Magic Mike.” More

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      ‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’ Review: Stripping Down to Bare Essentials

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      Channing Tatum returns as Florida’s favorite male exotic dancer, romancing a restless socialite played by Salma Hayek Pinault.“What does a woman want?” Sigmund Freud famously confessed that he had spent most of his career flummoxed by that question. In the 21st century it seems that the director Steven Soderbergh, the screenwriter Reid Carolin and the heterodox psychoanalytic theorist Channing Tatum have come up with an answer that Freud would never have dreamed of: Magic Mike.In “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the final chapter in a trilogy about lust, ambition and abdominal fitness in the modern age, Mike is focused on the desires of one woman in particular, a wealthy Londoner named Maxandra Mendoza. But the sources of Mike’s appeal — a heart as big as his trapezius, resolve as firm as his glutes, a character as sturdy as his quadriceps — haven’t changed.More than a decade has passed since the first movie, “Magic Mike” (2012), which was followed by “Magic Mike XXL” (directed by Gregory Jacobs) in 2015. Mike Lane, middle-aging gracefully, still resides in South Florida, but he isn’t quite where he had dreamed of being in life. A narrator (who will turn out to be an important character) informs us that Mike has lost his beloved furniture business. He also seems to have hung up his backless chaps and his fake police uniform and traded in stripping for bartending at fancy charity events.At one of these, he meets Maxandra — she goes by Max, and is played with regal insouciance by Salma Hayek Pinault — who discovers his background in expressive dance and hires him for a private performance. They settle on a price and establish boundaries that are promptly transgressed. She says she’s not hiring him for sex, and when they have sex anyway he declines payment. The ethical and other ambiguities raised by this encounter are potentially interesting, but the movie mostly has other matters on its mind.Each of the “Magic Mike” films has explored the nexus of sex, art and money from a different angle. “Magic Mike” was about how, in a precarious labor market, a gig worker might wrest dignity and autonomy from conditions rife with exploitation. “XXL” emphasized the extravagant pleasure of selling oneself as a high-end commodity and the aesthetic fulfillment of satisfying a customer. “Last Dance” is about the relationship between artist and patron, and also about something that can’t be reduced to libidinal or economic transactions.In other words, it’s a love story. Which makes things a little awkward, for Max and Mike and for the movie itself. Mike’s vocation as a stripper had been to embody a male object of female fantasy — or, given Tatum, Carolin and Soderbergh’s joint authorship, a male idea of what women long for. He and his fellow dancers perfected a choreography of swagger and surrender, an enactment of conquest that encoded submission as the highest form of gallantry.In “Last Dance,” the dance sequences that don’t involve Mike uphold that tradition, even as, offstage, Mike evolves into a different kind of fantasy object. He isn’t just supposed to be a camped-up embodiment of the perfect man, but the real thing.After jetting over to London, where Mike is installed in a guest room, he and Max embark on a tricky creative collaboration. Max’s faithless husband (a briefly encountered Alan Cox) owns a historic theater, and Max hires Mike to direct a sexed-up version of a stodgy costume drama, turning it into a rousing spectacle of masculine hotness and feminist empowerment. Which means hiring a lot of strippers.Those dudes do their jobs competently, though London may not be the first city that comes to mind when you think of rippling, glistening hunks of well-muscled man meat. And it’s only when Tatum himself takes the stage, to splash and writhe with Kylie Shea, that the heat and humidity rise to appropriately Floridian levels.A stage production in London only heats up when Tatum takes to the stage himself, with Kylie Shea.Warner Bros.Like its predecessors, “Last Dance” never forgets that it’s a musical at heart. Soderbergh, also serving as cinematographer and editor (under his customary pseudonyms, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard), keeps our eye on the bodies in motion. The dance numbers, choreographed by Alison Faulk and Luke Broadlick, feel a bit tame this time around, but the movie still pays ample respect to the terpsichorean craft practiced by Tatum and the hard-working members of Mike’s ensemble.As a romance, though, it demonstrates flat feet and balky rhythm. There are a handful of comic secondary characters, vaguely embodying familiar varieties of Britishness — a repressed city bureaucrat (Vicki Pepperdine); a grouchy manservant (Ayub Khan Din); a sharp-tongued adolescent (the excellent Jemelia George) — but Max and Mike inhabit a thinly imagined, flatly rendered world.Hayek Pinault and Tatum have a tantalizing chemistry, but the script doesn’t always help them activate it. All of the drama comes from Max, whose whims and mood swings sometimes complement and sometimes clash with Mike’s steady good humor. His easy, endless charm may, finally, get in the way. This man is so affable, so grounded, so gentlemanly that he achieves a kind of blank passivity. His chivalry begins to feel like a way of refusing emotional connection, a suit of armor that he neglected to take off when he shed his other costumes.What does Mike want? It’s probably the wrong question. And maybe the answer is exactly what a woman doesn’t want to know.Magic Mike’s Last DanceRated R. Adult entertainment. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More