Magic Mike's Last Dance

 This review may contain spoilers!

 

Magic Mike's Last Dance is the third film in the Magic Mike trilogy, this time seeing Mike fall in love with wealthy British divorcee, Maxandra. Working together the pair attempt to rework a stifled old British play into a sexed up strip show, flirting with feelings of love and attraction along the way. I'm not going to pretend the Mike and Max relationship was the best written thing ever, it had a few flaws. But the moment you first see them together, connecting via Mike's dancing paired with a few good moments of romantic tension and longing throughout, you actually get something that has you invested. There's a simple 'will they? Won't they?' element to the feature that becomes the best aspect of the narrative.

 

While I can't honestly say the choreography is as strong as it has been in the past, Magic Mike on a bad day still has some really impressive elements of strip dancing. In those moments where the story stops to showcase what most of the viewing audience is here to see the stops are really pulled off. Channing Tatum does two dances in the film and they're both phenomenal, but none more impressive than the dance he does in water during the final act.

 

Salma Hayek, who played Maxandra Mendoza, is far from her best work here but presents a character you will really warm up to as the film goes along; I liked that we got see Hayek play a character who was giddy with love like a teenager as opposed to the more matronly figures she has been otherwise playing. Ayub Khan-Din, who played Victor, is the best comedic performer in the feature; his disdain moving to grudging respect for Tatum's character is one of the better pieces of performance and writing. Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer and Adam Rodriguez, who played Big Dick Richie, Tarzan, Ken and Tito respectively, are a very welcome sight of a cameo; the chemistry and lighthearted way this group delivers lines is a fine reminder of what has made the previous films so successful.

 

However, the best performance came from Channing Tatum, who played title character: Mike Lane. It's very interesting to see how comfortably and consistently Tatum has played Mike over a decade. I think that's what I admire most about this performance for the third time out, everything around him might have changed but every detail and aspect of this protagonist is still perfectly caught by the actor portraying him. Tatum doesn't present Mike as the biggest voice in the room, nor even the smartest. But what he does present Mike as is this quiet yet self-assured dancer, a person who speaks their mind with purpose. Mike doesn't push his way into an exchange but instead really reasonably puts his view on the scene which can subtly shift how things play out. There is some incredible chemistry here between Tatum and Hayek, those moments of yearning for one another or trying to connect while keeping apart from one another really hits at the heart of a good romantic storyline. But what works best in this film is how Tatum dances this time around; he has two scenes which are both exceptionally intimate. But the final dance scene he does is this beautiful way of showcasing his feelings of love through choreography instead of words, which I found really powerful.

I find the Magic Mike sequels tricky ones to navigate because neither feature has a very strong plot but has excellent choreography. While Magic Mike XXL didn't know what to do so it made a lot of intermittent skit-like scenes, this film is a strange rags to riches story with Mike being a sort of Sugar Baby for Max. Yet the context of this relationship desolves and is refocused to the pair redirecting a sort of classic British play into a stripper stage show. But it's a main plot that feels very poorly conceived. The audience is never really guided to understand much of what the original play actually is, it's just weirdly a period piece. The eventual stripper show we get doesn't have much payoff either, there's no real substance to it. Ultimately the entire main plot is driven by the need for us to see a lot of strippers at a strip show by the end of the film. There are a number of comedic gags and antics inbetween to keep things moving but they never really land as the ensemble cast isn't very comedically gifted. There's a whole rich divorced family subplot with Max that comes across as fake and hard to relate to. Worse than that is this teenage adopted daughter of Max's, firstly you never really understand the purpose of that relationship within a film like this. But the big reason Zadie grates on this film is that she gives this stoic, dramatic narration about the purpose of dance over the whole of this film. It feels very tonally confusing and a lot like the film thinks it has more to say than it actually does.

Steven Soderbergh can direct a film better than this, I've seen him do it more than once. Hell, he did it better in the first Magic Mike. It leaves me with a lot of questions around how passionate people behind this project actually were. In any film that has as much dancing and movement as this you would expect the camera to move or have some sense of presence, but the style is just so typical and boring. Even the dance sequences are filmed in a very predictable and blocky manner at times. The editing also leaves a lot to be desired, there are some extremely long moments of lingering on shots where a cut obviously needs to happen. The worst example of this is during dance scenes, we get shots of extras looking half impressed for long periods of time rather than the dancing itself. This film probably boasts the worst soundtrack of the series with a lot of tracks that have otherwise been worn through before or others that just don't snap with the energy that is being demanded.

Alan Cox, who played Roger Rattigan, is utterly unconvincing as a former husband to Hayek's role; the pair have no chemistry or even authentic rage towards one another and Cox often feels like the antagonist out of a Hallmark film. Juliette Motamed, who played Hannah, just feels really awkwardly inserted into the main cast of the feature; Motamed's entire MC shtick in the final show doesn't work at all and is a strong reminder of how weak the main storyline is. Jemelia George, who played Zadie, is a character the film really could've done without; listening to such a monotonous style of line delivery made this a hard character to sit with for long.

There are two dances in this film worth watching, the rest is an incoherent mess of a story. I would give Magic Mike's Last Dance a 4/10.