Magic Mike – The Last Dance (2023)

The film told how the protagonist Mike Lane wants to get started as a furniture designer, working as a construction worker by day and flashing in a strip club by night. He also showed newcomer Adam (Alex Pettyfer) getting excessive club life to his head. Thanks in part to Matthew McConaughey, who embodied the eccentric owner of the club with palpable joy Magic Mike had a high entertainment factor – and at the same time had depth and heart. The 2015 sequel, Magic Mike XXL, directed by Soderbergh’s longtime assistant director Gregory Jacobs, largely bid farewell to that depth and quite blithely portrayed a stripper troupe’s road trip to a Myrtle Beach convention. The film was little more than a number revue, but at least its character drawing was sometimes quite charming, for example when it addressed the insecurities of men and the lust of various women.

And now comes Magic Mike – The Last Dance – again with Soderbergh himself in the director’s chair. Right at the beginning we learn that the furniture company of the titular hero has become a victim of the pandemic and that Mike has to keep his head above water as a bartender. At a fundraiser in Miami, he meets hostess Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), who learns of Mike’s past as a stripper and asks for a private performance after the event, for which she’s willing to shell out $6,000.

The sequence in which Maxandra makes this offer to Mike would also work as a standalone short. With a different cast but identical dialogues, it could become an oppressively bizarre chamber play in the style of Paradise: love (2012) will. However, since Hayek is stunningly attractive, the whole thing stays within the framework of a pretty erotic comedy, which in the further course presents us with a kind of Kamasutra exercise with (increasingly fewer) clothes: Mike’s dance routine becomes a hot, athletic foreplay and – beware, spoilers! – for all the hypocrisy that lies in the romanticization of this power imbalance, the only originally designed moment of this film. The two end up in bed together – and Maxandra convinces Mike to take her to London for a month because she has a creative project for him there. As Mike finally finds out, he is supposed to set up a dance show as a choreographer in an old theater that Maxandra was given after she separated from her rich husband. If he pulls it off, she wants to pay him $60,000.

There is talk of a revolutionary show that should be as ecstatic and transcending as Mike’s private dance – and of the power of women that should be shown in it. However, these words remain just as mere assertion as everything else in Magic Mike – The Last Dance. The film and the show, which culminates in the final act, are as pseudo-feminist and superficial as a number of badly aged 1980s and 1990s dramedies that masquerade as progressive but, upon closer inspection, remain utterly staid and mundane.

The high-society lady, astonishingly unimaginative and stereotypically interpreted by Hayek, looks like something out of a tired Disney joke – which is why it’s fitting that most of the conflicts surrounding her are “solved” in the manner of a disappointingly under-complex afternoon program for children of gags that could be subtitled “Please giggle!” Maxandra’s butler Victor (Ayub Khan-Din), a very, very British one-liner machine, and her smart-ass adoptive daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) reinforce this impression.

It is unfortunate that some dialogue passages seem like telenovela scenes both dramaturgically and aesthetically. That the dancers who are cast for the show remain nameless and characterless, even though making the strippers into distinctive characters was one of the strengths of the first two parts, is a questionable decision. And that the show is ultimately filmed in an unambitious way that just looks like the video recording of the event is kind of a shame.

Worst of all, however, is the dishonesty Magic Mike – The Last Dance in relation to the hardened bodies that are at the center here. in one Interview Tatum recently told how unnatural and even unhealthy it is to train for such a body (“You have to starve yourself”). When Mike is asked by the amazed and fascinated Maxandra how he could have such a body, he replies succinctly (and without any discernible irony) that it is simply due to the “genes of mom and dad”. We don’t see him train once. We don’t hear a word about exaggerated body images that have nothing to do with reality and unthinkingly celebrate the ideal of beauty in Abercrombie & Fitch advertising. If the film were a firework of entertainment, one could possibly object that cinema can simply be fun without claiming to be close to reality. That’s what’s missing Magic Mike – The Last Dance on the other hand, in wit and class. We really can all skip that last dance.