In comparison with 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Final Dance, was a box-office whiff. The third Magic Mike film is meant as the ultimate installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a coronary heart of gold, a aspect enterprise in carpentry, and a totally explored philosophy about ladies’s pleasure. However in contrast to the earlier Magic Mike motion pictures, it by no means constructed a fandom or grew to become a middle of on-line dialogue.
Blame the eight-year hole between the final movie and this one. Blame the battle to get individuals to observe motion pictures in theatrical launch. Or extra precisely, simply blame the limitless issues with the film itself. However for no matter motive, the movie barely made a ripple when it hit theaters in February 2023.
Magic Mike’s Final Dance is now streaming on Max, the platform it was initially made for. Like several movie hitting streaming, it now has a brand new likelihood at discovering an viewers. However the Max launch isn’t more likely to transfer the needle a lot, given what a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed challenge it’s. Frankly, there’s just one scene in Magic Mike’s Final Dance that’s actually value watching, at the least for followers of the earlier motion pictures, and it comes early within the movie.
For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital renters), the sequence begins about eight minutes in, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, known as to satisfy together with his employer of the second, a wealthy, bored girl named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry enterprise underneath, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering firm Maxandra hires for her newest fundraising gig. Depressed over her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from considered one of Mike’s exes that he does a “foolish dance” which may cheer her up. She’s prepared to supply him $6,000 for a non-public present.
Picture: Warner Bros.
Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore — however lured by the cash and stung by the “foolish dance” description, he modifies his thoughts, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s home of potted crops and knickknacks, and offers her a solo efficiency that doesn’t even attempt to masquerade as something aside from extremely theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.
The scene is in truth a “foolish dance,” but it surely’s the one a part of the film that basically feels just like the movies that preceded it — significantly like Magic Mike XXL, with its prolonged lectures (a few of them in poetic type, delivered by Donald Glover) about how fulfilling ladies’s fantasies is a sacred artwork. Mike begins by pulling up his shirt and placing Maxandra’s hand on his abs as if that they had therapeutic powers. Then he climbs throughout her and her furnishings, treating her to a lap dance that features carrying her round together with his face buried in her crotch, doing pull-ups on her knickknack cabinets whereas she yanks his pants off, and crawling throughout a desk on all fours together with her underneath him, pushing her alongside the floor together with his groin.
It’s all faintly hilarious. For these able to shopping for into the fantasy it’s promoting, it’s additionally form of horny, if solely as a result of each of the performers have the bodily energy and beauty to tug off these sorts of strikes. And if nothing else, it’s a prerequisite for diving into the commonly humorous interviews the actors have performed concerning the expertise of filming it. Both method, the scene is handled with the straight-faced, near-religious gravity the Magic Mike motion pictures have at all times dropped at sensual dance routines. The actors are mainly miming slow-motion, acrobatic intercourse, whereas protecting their garments on and their faces solemn.
The remainder of the film is only a downhill run, beginning with the shot instantly after the dance sequence, the place it turns into clear that Mike and Maxandra adopted their mimed intercourse with precise intercourse. Which is ok, besides that from there, audiences are requested to consider that Mike has fallen for Maxandra and can do something to remain in a relationship together with her, despite the fact that she’s risky, manipulative, dishonest, abusive, and above all, written so shallowly and erratically that it’s laborious to see the enchantment. Particularly since Mike himself appears extra like a prop than a presence for many of this film. The carpentry work that outlined him in Magic Mike is gone. The chums who outlined him in Magic Mike XXL have been sidelined, aside from a quickie Zoom check-in to acknowledge they exist. His philosophizing about his position on this planet is over. All that defines him on this film is his romance with Maxandra — which, inexplicably, is framed and narrated in elaborately poetic, nonsensical language by Maxandra’s prickly teen daughter.
Photograph: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Assortment
Extra considerably, the film was expressly constructed round selling the real-life Magic Mike Stay stage present, and it offers the principle characters fairly minimal and uninteresting arcs whereas it focuses on their efforts to provide an analogous strip efficiency. The film’s large climax is a prolonged dance efficiency by a bunch of recent performers who principally don’t even get character names, not to mention personalities. (Truthful discover: Different Polygon viewers appreciated it greater than I did. Should you’re high quality with the dearth of stakes or specifics for that sequence, and simply need spectacle, staging, and a few muscular guys taking off their shirts, it begins simply earlier than the 88-minute mark.)
Tatum dances once more in that sequence, and the choreography is compelling — he and dance associate Kylie Shea, who additionally by no means will get a personality identify, slide round throughout a moist stage collectively. However there’s no sense of stakes in any of it, aside from the query of whether or not Mike and Maxandra’s underdeveloped, disagreeable relationship will proceed, or they’ll cut up up after the present.
That’s the enjoyable of streaming, although — viewers can dip out and in at leisure, and deal with the enjoyable bits with out committing to the tedious ones. They’ll additionally store round for one thing extra gratifying to observe after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic routine is over. The unique Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL are additionally each on Max — and on Netflix, in addition to many digital rental platforms.
