Magic Mike's Last Dance review: A foolhardy fantasy that lacks spark or sizzle
Channing Tatum is back as exotic dancer Magic Mike for his third rodeo – but it's a limp end to a once-great series.
Bumping and grinding his way back onto screens, exotic dancer Magic Mike returns for a third rodeo. The hit film series inspired by star Channing Tatum’s earlier years as a stripper, Magic Mike (2012) and Magic Mike XXL were blue collar dramas that explored the economic necessity of such work. Like director Steven Soderbergh’s earlier film The Girlfriend Experience, which dealt with the world of high-class escorts, it lifted the lid on a job that many would frown upon.
Yet Soderbergh, who helmed the first Magic Mike, produced the second and returns here to direct, seems to have forgotten that, or rather just dismissed it. Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a foolhardy fantasy that lacks spark or sizzle. When we join Mike (Tatum), post-pandemic, he’s no longer got skin in the stripping game. Instead, he’s working as a bartender in Miami, serving cocktails at a charity function organised by Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). She’s married to Roger (Alan Cox), a wealthy Englishman whose extramarital fling is sending them to the divorce courts.
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Discovering that Mike has a talent for making women feel good, Max hires him for a $6000 dance (in one of the more amusing moments, Mike spends time checking her living room’s fixtures and fittings to make sure they’ll withstand the acrobatics he’s about to put them through). Left breathless by his performance, Max offers Mike the chance to come to London for a month. Before long, he’s living in a luxury townhouse with a butler (Ayub Khan Din) and Max’s bookish daughter Zadie (Jemelia George).
The reason for this trip? She has control of her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s theatre, The Rattigan, currently staging a dull-looking costume drama called 'Isabel Ascendant'. Max wants to rile her spouse by bringing in Mike to reboot the show, choregraphing buff male dancers for a one-night-only extravaganza. Although as Max claims: "I’m not a scorned woman and this is not a strip show." Arguably it’s a notch classier, especially with Mike’s wet-and-wild performance with a female dancer in the finale – although anyone going to see the film to watch Chippendales-style trouser-ripping might feel a little short-changed.
Scripted by Reid Carolin, who has penned the whole trilogy, Magic Mike’s Last Dance may appeal more to the American public, especially those who love Downton Abbey and think that all British people shop at Fortnum & Mason. It’s a tourist’s eye view of London, with Soderbergh even emphasising that, the camera catching landmarks like the London Eye and stalls filled with tatty Union Jack-branded souvenirs (the last time the British capital was this cliché was 2015’s Minions, when the yellow cartoon fellows arrived en masse).
Oddly, there’s something very reminiscent of Absolutely Fabulous here – with Hayek’s hard-drinking, middle-aged mother like a cocktail of Edina and Patsy and her offspring like Julia Sawalha’s character, the sensible intellectual. The difference is, Ab Fab was a comedy that sent up its characters, whereas this takes its protagonists seriously. It’s largely nonsensical, but its bigger crime, perhaps, is that the chemistry between Tatum and Hayek is non-existent. Sad to say, but Magic Mike has lost his mojo.
To be fair, there are some funny moments – and Soderbergh does take advantage of British comedic talent. Bad Education’s Ethan Lawrence appears as the show’s technical wiz and Getting On’s Vicky Pepperdine pops up as a bureaucrat who needs to be charmed to ensure the show can go on. Sadly, the male dancers are cardboard cut-outs with no personality whatsoever, a big change from the earlier films where Mike’s cohorts were vividly realised. Lacking the grit of its predecessors, this is a limp end to a once-great series.
Magic Mike's Last Dance is released in cinemas from Friday 10th February 2023. Check out what else is on with our TV Guide, or visit our Movies hub for more news and features.
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Authors
James Mottram is a London-based film critic, journalist, and author.
