I hope this is Magic Mike’s Last Dance – or the franchise does a major course correction.
Steven Soderbergh returns to the director’s chair of the Magic Mike franchise in this third installment, and Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault star as a male stripper and a divorced socialite who takes Mike to London. In London, Mike is tasked with turning a posh British drama into a dance show.
Rather than treating fans to the dance sequences that attracted them to the first two installments of the franchise or the surprisingly deep relationships between the male dancers that gave the other two films some unexpected depth, most of Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a ham-handed drama about artistic sensibility. To make matters worse, there are voice-over narrations that are seemingly one character’s primary school report on the sociological importance of dance.
The relationships between Mike and the other dancers are not explored in any depth, but the real missed opportunity is the flat arc that characterizes Mike’s relationship with Salma Hayek Pinault’s character, Maxandra. Their relationship begins sexually, but as though writer Reid Carolin had nowhere else to go with the characters, they immediately stop sleeping together, much to both of their chagrin. The “will they, won’t they” conflict that occupies the majority of the film lacks any suspense and feels like a backtrack rather than logical character development.
Fundamentally, Magic Mike’s Last Dance does not understand its characters or their appeal. As a small example, one throwaway scene depicts Mike struggling to tie his tie. But a simple Google search reveals a multitude of images of Mike wearing a tie (and little else) in the previous two films and in the first scene of the same movie. It’s lazy writing, a shorthand for suggesting that Mike felt uncomfortable in that moment.
Even if you discount all of those pesky technical elements like plot and character arcs and engaging stories and you just evaluate Magic Mike’s Last Dance on the strip show, you’ll be disappointed. There’s one alluring sequence at the beginning and a couple sequences during the rehearsals that are too brief to titillate. Most of the dancing is saved for the final sequence, which is rather tame and left me thinking about better movies like The Full Monty (1997) or Cabaret (1972).
After Magic Mike (2012), I doubt fans were aching for “What if Magic Mike was the main character in All that Jazz (1979),” but that’s what they got. And that may have to serve as Magic Mike’s last dance.
