There’s an inherent contradiction in trying to make a sequel to Magic Mike XXL. On the one hand, it left Channing Tatum and the boys in a prime position for further dance-centric and erotic adventures – there was an old joke about how not much really happens in XXL, especially concerning its perceived lack of conflict and the lack of finality at the end only helps that – but on the other, there’s genuinely no good way to recapture what made that such a rare and exciting sequel. It was a “Dudes Rock” mood piece, a celebration of female-centric desire and healthy male friendship, that crackled with wit and a genuine ferocity in how dedicated it was to entertaining all audiences willing to take the ride. In essence, it stopped trying to portray stripping within a narrative. Instead, it became the ultimate cinematic expression of male striptease performance, mirroring how the stage-bound cabaret burlesque seamlessly flows between acts, set pieces, and emcee banter.
XXL was one of the most traditional dance films to emerge from Hollywood in some time: It wasn’t bound to the narrative conventions rigorously established within the genre, given the lack of romance and conflict; it deliberately focused on mood above all else tonally; and it, like the best of the Step Up films, recognized that the dancing was, in fact, the point. And when you have a star like Tatum – who, aside from his pal and writer Reid Carolin and director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh (who let producing partner Gregory Andrews take the reins for XXL), is the primary creative force of Magic Mike films – who our current film climate has so failed that he’s forced to be self-effacing to have any of his talents taken seriously outside of this one franchise, you’re gonna want to show off his moves. Any follow-up runs into the issue of either retreading ground that XXL perfected or over-complicating the formula, much like the first Magic Mike did with its focus on the rise and fall of “The Kid,” which remains one of the least-interesting plots to supplement an otherwise damn good film in recent memory.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, given that Soderbergh’s back in the director’s chair, that Magic Mike’s Last Dance resembles that first film more than it does XXL. It makes a sort of thematic sense to warp the edges, keeping the focus on the core ethos of the enterprise, which XXL so intensely embodied, and Last Dance contains the least amount of Tatum, in terms of his individual dancing showcases. Even if it might not look like it – damn, that dude is aging like fine wine – he is getting a bit older, and spotlighting an up-and-coming generation of dancers is a great endeavor. It’s a putting-on-a-show picture in which Mike, after having lost his furniture business due to COVID economic turmoil and having to tend bar at charity events to make ends meet, is gifted the opportunity to stage a dramatic reinterpretation of a stodgy old Victorian costume piece on the London stage. This is all thanks to Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), the estranged wife of an impossibly wealthy business magnate, who hires Mike for a solo dance after he slings vodka sodas to a group at one of her functions in Miami, recommended to her by a junior employee that Mike serviced, almost a decade earlier, at her bachelorette party (he let her off with a warning, after all).
Mendoza sees this as an opportunity that fulfills several of her desires: To revitalize an old theater that her husband has left to rot; to strike back at her shitty husband after he cheated on her; to bring Mike’s talents to a broader audience than just the folks in the states; and, importantly, to allow her to have some creative outlet, where she, alongside Mike, can express herself by recreating the liberation and passion she felt when, after pouring her a drink, testing the structural integrity of the mounted shelving, and rearranging the furniture, he started to move. So, the pair scout out the best dancers in London, begin to re-write the show, start staging it, and deal with the London stage bureaucracy, all while slowly falling in love in the process, much to the chagrin of her precocious daughter, Zadie (Jemeila George) and the bemusement of her stately and sarcastic butler (Ayub Khan Din). But her husband has other plans and, importantly, controls the purse strings. He’ll do anything to shut the show down before it’s even able to get off the ground, and the two and their newfound company have to race to stage the show before their doors are closed.
It’s a pretty compelling plot – after all, if the Muppets could wring decades of material out of this structure, then surely Tatum and company could – but a few issues hold it back a little bit. Soderbergh’s intense focus on diegetic sound (meaning that there’s little added sound outside of what’s going on within the scene itself) is a two-edged sword. This means you’ll hear every bit of Carolin’s often pitch-perfect dialogue with a crackling clarity, with the rhythm of conversational speech guiding much of the scene and edit. Still, it also makes the entire film feel particularly quiet in a way that doesn’t wholly jive with the energetic ethos behind the film, even if it is being deployed with a sense of dramatic purpose so that anticipation for the final performance can steadily build and finally burst in an orgasmic blend of movement, light, and sound on cue.
Carolin also chooses, for whatever reason, to explain through narration (given to us by Zadie), character motivation and, worse, offer up a lengthy critical analysis of the historical and sociocultural purposes of dance as a way of philosophically gilding the lily. It tries to state, in that breach of Soderbergh’s sonic ethos, what XXL proved through demonstration, which is that striptease is, in fact, artful dance and not simply mere entertaining eroticism. This plays out in practice like a high schooler following the five-paragraph essay structure, returning and restating in obvious terms the franchise’s thesis after providing examples and evidence, and it ultimately gets in the way of us just being able to experience its joyfulness firsthand. It’s just a sort of dead weight on the film, endowing it with Zadie’s precociousness, which, in an in-scene context, is charming but becomes aggressively goofy atop it – imagine Breakin‘ with a Golan/Globus knock-off Barthes dropping ill-timed dimes about primitive dance. On second thought, please don’t imagine that, because I’d actually like to see that movie. It’s a bad example, but you hopefully get what I mean.
But the light of the Magic Mike films, even when diluted by Alex Pettyfer, stalled-out dramatics, and the absence of Mike’s crew (outside of a single Zoom call), can not be fully snuffed out. Soderbergh – or shall I say “Peter Andrews” and “Mary Ann Bernard” – remains unparalleled at crafting fabulously compelling and wholly cinematic dance sequences, making ample use of how vivid and striking the camera can make the stage environment, drawing out every color cast on the performer by a gel light in rich hues and emphasizing the raw energy and intensity in their movements. The film’s final act, in which the show does go on, is incredibly and impossibly fun. The number of different stage settings that we’re presented with makes each transition feel striking: One minute, we’re watching an intense breakdance or a full-cast strut to AWOLNATION’s “Sail,” mirroring Mike’s emergence in the first film, in the next we’re watching the suited cast move like the tuxedoed suitors in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes but to the sound of the Dandy Warhols’ “Boys Better,” or to a faux-rain-soaked and lovelorn dance between a member of the cast and a ballerina hired at the last minute as a desperate romantic gesture.
It is when Last Dance finally hits the clutch, shifts into sixth, and really starts to fly down the Autobahn of stimulation after being stuck in fourth for much of its first hour and change. Magic Mike belongs in the fast lane, zooming past the anonymous sedans and boxy colorless SUVs of its competition, and even if it takes this long to get up to speed, all one wants to do is just go for the ride again. It’s a shame that this looks like the end of the model line. One hopes that someone can step up and fill the absence that Tatum’s creation (it is his, after all, and one can view the creative romance at the film’s core as a conversation between him and Soderbergh) is leaving in our cinematic landscape. The multiplex is better when it has Mike’s magic uplifting and enhancing its enchantments.