Magic Mike

The words Magic Mike may conjure up images of sweaty, sculpted, undulating men, dancing unthreateningly for hoards of screaming women, but there has always ...

“Magic Mike” and “XXL” (directed by Gregory Jacobs) both latched on to a kind of pure joy in the spectacle of the male stripper. release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “sexual material and language.” Running time: 112 minutes. It’s a clever conceit for a filmmaker who never tires of singeing the establishment he continues work in. After an acrobatic, but fully clothed, encounter with Mike, she decides to whisk him away to London, dress him up and put him in charge of staging a show that promises to make its audiences feel the way she did the night she met Mike. It’s also part fantasy, part bleak reality, part commentary the fundamental value of dance and what’s lost in a society that has forgotten how. Asking why sequels exist doesn’t usually produce satisfying answers, but “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is a film that was born backwards, a fit of inspiration from Steven Soderbergh after seeing what Tatum had done with Magic Mike Live.

The third Magic Mike movie is silly, sexy, and all about supply and demand.

Part of the appeal is simply that he’s trying to do it. Even as Soderbergh, Carolin, and Tatum explore a system of want that is arguably illogical and likely impossible, it is respectful to that system. [Magic Mike XXL](https://www.vox.com/2015/6/30/8870077/magic-mike-xxl-review) (a stroke of titular genius), in which “female desire” comes to the fore, and explodes a bit, definitionally. Like a dancer, the movie knows that once those elements are lost, they’re harder to regain than they were to gain in the first place. What the Magic Mike movies have only leaned further and further into is that it can also be uniquely fun. The movies have always understood that in this system, demand — desire — is actually the hard part. There’s not just the trick of creating desire, there’s the undertaking of maintaining it. Mike has lost his furniture business to the pandemic, he owes money to his friends, and Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault, playing a ridiculous role with a lot of fun, pathos, and magenta) is paying him an absurd amount of money to put on a show. This flouts the script of the show-within-the-show of Last Dance, which very explicitly posits that one of the primary things a woman might want is “not just one man.” “Lots of guys” is a bedrock premise, employed by teen magazines, [first Magic Mike movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4eqIV-XMnA) is “about the economy, actually.” This was maybe the first thing the series really understood about female desire, the eventual subject of its trilogy, which concludes with [Magic Mike’s Last Dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIGdw-BRxw). The gang, now more explicitly styled as a fun team of buddies, embarks on a road trip of multi-demographic proportions, bringing joy to hooting and hollering groups of older white women, Black women, and queer people — which is to say that “female desire” is best understood as a useful shorthand for something perhaps even more complicated and interesting, without pausing to get into the ins and outs of gender. The Magic Mike trilogy is about the economics of female desire, actually.

Channing Tatum as Mike Lane and Kylie Shea facing each other on stage with rain pouring. At the climax of “Magic Mike's Last Dance,” Channing Tatum performs a ...

The film ends with nearly thirty minutes of dance numbers, including a ten-man version of Tatum’s famous routine to Ginuwine’s “Pony,” a Busby Berkeley-esque sequence in which muscled performers spill down a double staircase in waves, and a silky contemporary-dance solo. During the “Step Up” press tour, Tatum told interviewers, “I never did any kind of class whatsoever.” In “Last Dance,” he moves like a souped-up car: sleek, low to the ground, capable of great speed. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets.” His way of moving was grounded and explosive; Fred Astaire’s was elevated, aristocratic, and cool. The choreography, filmed in closeup, makes a case that the most charged and intimate view of an American male is a pair of aging knees in dancer’s knee pads, accompanied by large, slightly hairy thighs and unglamorous feet. At the climax, Tatum performs a complex, erotic duet in about six inches of water with the American ballerina Kylie Shea. “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” which was inspired by the making of the stage show, finds Mike washed up again, working as a cater waiter who occasionally gets recognized by women from his past. “I just kind of make it look like I do.” In “Magic Mike XXL,” a frothy tale of a road trip to a stripping convention, the members of the Xquisite Male Revue are given more elaborate backstories, and even more stage time; instead of muscle spasms and crooked string lights, we get classic movie-musical numbers. Or, in “Magic Mike,” when he lets his top hat fall and skitter down the runway as he worms across the floor. It’s what happens in “Singin’ in the Rain” when Gene Kelly hops backward over a bar in unison with Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor, and the heel of his shoe—or maybe part of his pants, we can’t quite see—catches the edge of some fringe on a stool and makes it swing. The men are dealing with an alien yet positive force—“a zombie apocalypse of repressed desire,” as Mike puts it. Although you cheer when he quits the show at the end of the first film, and at the end of the second, you don’t really blame him for coming back.

Forget getting ahead in America. The stripper at the heart of the film trilogy is working frantically not to lose his shirt.

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. 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. The deeper concerns of “Magic Mike” shouldn’t have been a surprise. The purportedly final movie of the saga opens with a British-accented voice-over that treats Mike as an anthropological subject to be explored. 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. 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. The “Magic Mike” movies are about impeccable abs, female pleasure, male friendship and the power of a great lap dance. 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 movie, set in Tampa, Fla., drew audiences looking for “ [hot boys,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/movies/magic-mike-with-channing-tatum-draws-gay-men.html) but the story within was more melancholy than the squeal-inducing imagery of ripped dudes in goofy, barely there costumes suggested. “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.

The third and final Magic Mike movie isn't nearly as sexy or entertaining as its predecessors. Mike (Channing Tatum) is now bartending and is seduced by a ...

Soderbergh has always liked to subvert expectations, and here he seems bent on short-circuiting a lot of the pleasures we've come to expect from the Magic Mike movies. The play is a dreary-looking period drama called Isabel Ascendant, and Max thinks it needs a massive contemporary overhaul, with more heat and more urgency — and, yes, an ensemble of male strippers. Max, impressed by the passion and artistry of Mike's dancing, asks him to come back to London with her. Mike gives her what she asks for, starting with a lap dance and building to what looks like an elaborate home-gymnastics routine. Three years later, the director Gregory Jacobs leaned into the erotic spectacle of it all with the exuberant [Magic Mike XXL](https://www.npr.org/2015/07/03/418841406/pop-culture-happy-hour-no-250-magic-mike-xxl-and-catastrophe), placing women's desires front and center in a way that made even the first movie look staid. One evening, he finds himself mixing a drink for a wealthy London-based socialite named Maxandra Mendoza, played with a nice mix of vulnerability and steel by

'Magic Mike' changed his personal and professional life. Now the filmmaker is sending the stripper with abs of gold off into the sunset.

A lot of what's happening to Mike is a woman coming in and recognizing and valuing him for who he is, which is something that he hasn't felt before. And the second movie was kind of a shedding of that. I was writing the first movie right before I was turning 30, and Chan had turned 30.

Channing Tatum bids an apparent farewell to the franchise that made him a star in Magic Mike's Last Dance.

This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. TATUM: (As Mike Lane) You're serious right now? But the buddy banter that made the first two movies pop when the dancing stopped - replaced by earnest declarations. But you know that adage about how dramatists should show, not tell - the one the first two "Magic Mike" movies made flesh, as it were, by leaving very little about male anatomy to the imagination? Well, this one is more about leaving very little unsaid. Accuracy and availability may vary. You'll want to savor it because there's nothing in the next hour and a half that remotely approaches it for entertainment value, including an ill-advised callback to its more memorable moves in a finale that is bigger and wetter - by which I'm afraid I mean rain-soaked - and not nearly as sexy. Audiences showered it with more than $100 million and did that again for a sequel, so Tatum's back with a film called "Magic Mike's Last Dance." BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: The first 17 minutes or so are everything a "Magic Mike" fan could wish. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LAST DANCE") (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MAGIC MIKE'S LAST DANCE") It's been more than a decade since Channing Tatum first starred in "Magic Mike," a comedy based on his own pre-acting stint as a stripper.

Whether it's Channing Tatum whipping his kit off in the well-oiled franchise or the return of Hayley Williams's powerpop punks, our critics have you ...

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