Compared to that of 2015 Magic Mike XXLthe sequel by Steven Soderbergh, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, was a box-office fragrance. The third Magic Mike movie is intended to be the final installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a heart of gold, a carpentry side hustle, and a thoroughly researched philosophy about women’s pleasure. But unlike the previous Magic Mike movies, it never built a fandom or became a center of online discussion.
Blame it on the eight-year gap between the last movie and this one. Blame it struggle to get people to watch movies in theatrical version. Or rather, just blame the endless problems on the movie itself. But for whatever reason, the movie was barely making waves when it hit theaters in February 2023.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance now streaming on Max, the platform for which it was originally created. Like any movie that gets streamed, this one now has another chance to find an audience. But the Max release probably won’t move the needle much given what a daunting, calculated, half-hearted project it is. Honestly, there’s only one scene in it Magic Mike’s Last Dance that’s really worth watching, at least for fans of the previous movies, and it comes early in the movie.
For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital tenants), the series picks up about eight minutes after Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is called in to meet with his current employer, a wealthy, bored woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID has brought Mike’s carpentry business down and he’s doing odd jobs like bartending for the catering company Maxandra hires for her latest fundraiser. Depressed by her impending divorce, Maxandra learned from one of Mike’s exes that he was doing a “silly dance” that might cheer her up. She is willing to offer him $6,000 for a private show.
Image: Warner Bros.
Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore – but lured by the money and stung by the description of “silly dance”, he changes his mind, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s house of potted plants and trinkets, and gives her a solo performance that is no more do. I’m not even trying to pretend to be anything other than a very theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.
The scene is basically a “silly dance,” but it’s the only part of the movie that really feels like the movies that preceded it – especially when Magic Mike XXL, with his lengthy lectures (some in poetic form, delivered by Donald Glover) on how fulfilling women’s fantasies is a sacred art. Mike starts by pulling up his shirt and placing Maxandra’s hand on his abs as if they have healing powers. Then he climbs over her and her furniture, treats her to a lap dance where he carries her around with his face buried in her crotch, does pull-ups on her trinkets shelves as she takes off his pants, and crawls across a table on hands and feet with her under him, pushing her across the surface with his crotch.
It’s all blandly hilarious. For those who are able to get into the fantasy it sells, it’s also kind of sexy, if only because both performers have the physical strength and grace to pull off this kind of move. And if nothing else, it is a prerequisite to dive into the dive generally funny interviews the actors have done about the experience of filming it. Either way, the scene is treated with the straightforward, almost religious seriousness that the Magic Mike movies have always brought to sensual dance routines. The actors basically mimic slow-motion, acrobatic sex, while keeping their clothes on and their faces solemn.
The rest of the movie is just a descent, starting with the shot right after the dance sequence, where it becomes clear that Mike and Maxandra followed their simulated sex with real sex. That’s fine, except from there the audience is asked to believe that Mike has fallen for Maxandra and will do anything to maintain a relationship with her, even though she’s volatile, manipulative, dishonest, abusive, and written so superficially most of all . and whimsical that it is difficult to see the profession. Especially since Mike himself seems more like a prop than a presence for most of this film. The carpentry that characterized him magical mike is gone. The friends who defined him Magic Mike XXL have been sidelined, save for a quickie Zoom check-in to confirm they exist. His philosophizing about his role in the world is over. All that characterizes him in this film is his romance with Maxandra – which, inexplicably, is framed and narrated in elaborately poetic, nonsensical language by Maxandra’s prickly teenage daughter.
Photo: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
More importantly, the movie is expressly built around promoting real life Magic Mike Live stage show, and it gives the main characters pretty minimal and uninteresting arcs while focusing on their efforts to produce a similar comic show. The movie’s big climax is a lengthy dance performance by a bunch of new performers who usually don’t even get character names let alone personalities. (Honest note: other Polygon viewers liked it more than I did. If you’re okay with the fact that there are no stakes or details for that sequence, and you just want spectacle, staging, and some muscular guys taking their shirts off, then it’s on just before the 88 minutes.)
Tatum dances in that order again, and the choreography is compelling – he and dance partner Kylie Shea, who also never gets a character name, slide across a wet stage together. But there’s nothing at stake, aside from whether Mike and Maxandra’s underdeveloped, unpleasant relationship will continue, or whether they’ll break up after the show.
That’s the nice thing about streaming, though: viewers can hop in and out at their leisure and focus on the fun stuff without committing to the annoying. They can also look around for something more fun to watch after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic routine is over. The original magical mike And Magic Mike XXL are also on both Max and Netflix, as well as many digital rental platforms.