Magic Mike's Last Dance would have you believe it's no tawdry affair but love at first grind
By converting a salacious origin story into a theatrical dance fantasy, does Soderbergh's backstage franchise end up kicking its magic to the curb
Magic Mike's Last Dance, USA, 2023, 112 mins | Comedy, Drama | Starring Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek | Dir. Steven Soderbergh | Screenplay by Reid Carolin | Prod. Co.: Warner Bros.
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In the middle of Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a delightful short film practically steals the show. On the top floor of a London double-decker bus, an under-appreciated bureaucrat finds herself surrounded by a bevy of single buff dudes, one in each chair ahead of her. On cue, they spring to life in unison, choreographed in a cheerful bit of musical theatre. The routine delivers joy to a glum woman and could be a festival winner on its own. This sunshine moment hints at its Broadway aspirations that strive to rise above its indecent origins. But to do so means leaving the grind mostly behind. Thus it resorts to a minimum quota filling to meet its brand expectations of licentiousness.
The film opens with a private dance and an eye full of Channing Tatum to satiate the Magic Mike voyeur. Still, when it comes to its public face, a sanitization strategy is very much in play, re-choreographing the intimacy of a lap dance into a commercial theatrical enterprise that will underscore the politics of permission. The double-decker scene is a tiny gem that sparkles in an otherwise primarily joyless exercise of repelling against its origins with no clear direction forward other than producing more streaming fodder.
In this third installment, the moves are still here, but the drama shifts from the hustler aspirations of the men to the lady’s pov, specifically Maxandra Mendoza, played by the pinch-hitting Salma Hayek1, and her need to get satisfaction. (Of course, having a normative feminine name would not be powerful enough for a woman of Hayek’s presumed status. She needs to be Max-ed out, as it were, and get a male nickname).
The first few scenes set in Miami, where Max first meets Mike, re-acquaint us with Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane. He’s keeping event attendees lubricated with his chill approach to bartending. We quickly learn his faux-cop, trouser-tearing act is long in the past, and that dream of being a furniture impresario is also dashed (thanks, pandemic!) None of this, however, has harshened his vibe as he continues serving up the chill, coincidentally to a former client from the first film, Kim (Caitlin Gerard), one of the gals entertained by the hide-the-gun routine recalled in a quick flashback for the uninitiated.
Kim, without an ounce of discretion, spreads the juicy goss of running into “Magic Mike” to the event’s socialite organizer Maxandra. Who, it turns out, is wound up from her drawn-out divorce and needs something to help her relax, even if just for a few minutes. Hence Kim spills the beans about Mike, all in the name of a good cause. So Max summons our economically squeezed hooch pourer to investigate his strictly on-the-DL services that once helped our now fiancée-respectable Kim those many wild years ago.
After some perfunctory negotiations, it turns out Mike has never been more ready to peel off that long-sleeved T and get down to some world-class grinding in service of female empowerment—of course. The two hit it off into an ensuing one-night stand, which we learn is no longer considered tawdry. On the contrary, without even a glint of a smirk, it’s presented as pure magic. Yet not enough to indulge in, apparently, as returning director Steven Soderbergh only informs us of their between-the-sheets chemistry by jump-cutting to the next morning.
Soderbergh is no stranger to the erotic. His late 80’s cinematic break-out was the erotic indie hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape. His cannon contains many other erotically charged cinematic moments outside of the Mike franchise: Out of Sight, The Girlfriend Experience, Side Effects, and Behind the Candelabra, to name a few. Yet, in this most intimate and formative moment, he's compelled to skip ahead to the next morning, as if we’re suddenly watching basic cable. This quickie segment may be due to Hayek’s pitch hitting with zero prep2. But then, how much script does one need for a roll in the hay with the ever-charismatic and most definitely “still got it” Channing Tatum?
The film continues its hurried opening pace as Mike boards a flight with Max for a get-to-know-me scene. Then, with significant Freudian framing, the film quickly lands us straight between the arches of the iconic Tower Bridge in jolly old London. Here we begin our narrative proper, where we will discover women’s unquenched desire for everything all at once needs an urgent upgrade. Conveniently, as it turns out, Mike is just the guy to pull it off—but only if he mostly keeps it all on. You see, things are going to be platonic going forward.
We keep calm and chauffer on in the lap of luxury courtesy of mama-boss Max’s butler Victor (Ayub Khan-Din), doing double duty behind the wheel of the family’s Rolls Royce, in addition to his domestic charges. Nothing to see here, just the nouveau riche trying to roll like the inherited class. Max’s purview of her husband’s company holdings includes a heritage-site English Theatre, The Rattigan. Seemingly, much to no one’s delight, it is currently running a stodgy old play, the fictitious Isabel Ascendant. Due to her divorce, Max suddenly objects to the play’s repressive ideology, which has come to represent everything she hates about her husband, except, of course, his money.
The limit of two options facing the fictitious play’s female protagonist is of the common sort: either she picks the douchy rich guy or the broke romantic lover3. But women deserve to have it all, Max muses to the troupes. On the spot and in front of the entire company, she fires the play’s director straight from central casting: overweight, white, middle-aged, snarky, and an entitled representative of the patriarchy (incidentally, also the archetype for her husband). She will install Mike as the director (more accurately, the choreographer. But why quibble) and get him to channel the magic she felt during their one-night stand.
Through Mike’s movement savvy, she’ll deliver her have-it-all ideology to womenkind, sharing the magic of the grind 🎸. Yet to do so, she cuts off her source of magic by swearing chastity with Mike. On the surface, nixing pleasure for business seems prudent, but tacitly, going platonic is a test of whether Mike’s love for her is true or if he is using her to continue his love of the grind 📺.
The two set about to re-tool, or more specifically, throw out the old English theatrical twaddle and choreograph a troupe of professionally trained dancers from as far away as Italy into a tongue-in-cheek, kinetically genuflecting chorus before their revered audience of women and approving men. Conveniently, for the film, re-jigging the story as a stage play means Soderbergh and the producers can continually cut to the fictional audience (and they do so copiously) enjoying the hell out of the show as a constant reminder to us, the poor movie-going public that we really ought to be having a great time too.
Ironically, all this euphoria must begin with the most Victorian of permission signifiers, an offered and met hand-holding exchange—how sexy. By the man offering his hand to a lady, the film absent-mindedly teases a comeback for chivalry. The irony of a film that wants to empower a woman by gifting her the male gaze while selling the fantasy of having it all: money, sex, power, and love, foolishly finds itself all twisted up, having to start with the most traditional of courtship gestures: asking for the woman’s hand as a sign of permission. Should we not also gain permission for her father while we’re at it? Maybe even dress up and invite all our friends for the contract signing. Perhaps an independent officiant could be hired to make it legal. After all, the film doesn’t fail to remind us that permission-seeking must always be maintained. Welcome to the new bureaucracy of the one-night stand. We might as well be thorough and throw in a prenup. Don’t you think?
Mike’s Last Dance is not the worst movie by any means. The fact that it’s watered down and has no teeth is hardly a singular problem. Or that its gender permission politics are more convoluted than an old-school game of twister. These awkward tropes are placed in almost everything produced now. To single this film out would be the equivalent of decrying in the ‘70s that everything is now made of plastic. Supposing that you can overlook the relationship filler, its family-friendly sanitization, its permission didactics, its Broadway aspirations, and the gender power reversal that neuters the male lead. In that case, you may still enjoy the parts of the film that do groove—as truncated as they are. Though, the numbers that compose the jazzy finalé make the enterprise feel like a one-off charity show rather than something that could fulfill an indefinite Broadway run.
If you’ve only come for the promise of the dance, there is not much "magic" that remains, having been whittled down from the carefree, raunchy fun it initially set out to gift the bachelorette set. This sanitization effort is supported by Mike’s deference to Max, whose teen daughter is welcomed to attend the show. Hence, it must now kid-ify itself. It’s yet another irony in the face of the original, where Mathew McConaughey’s scene-stealing turn as the first movie’s older show impresario needed no sanitization. Arguably, this is the stage where Mike may have now found himself at his age, had he not lucked into the honey pot of Maxandra through the script’s magical contrivances that award the handsome with life’s windfalls.
The kidification of Magic Mike borders on the ridiculous when Hayek instructs Victor to shield her mid-teen daughter’s eyes from watching an already sanitized Broadway-style show. On top of telling us how to date women, the movie wants to make us think we're watching something more salacious than we are by instructing us on how to parent our kids, at the same time. But, of course, none of this is on brand from the Magic Mike of yesteryears. This is not to say the series can’t evolve, but to completely lose itself is another matter.
As one of the film’s producers, the pov shift to Maxandra is a stated intent of Tatum, who claims the male’s journey is now over-documented. Yet, despite having all the right moves cranked and ready to let loose, the film instead decides to contain Mike and his coterie of movers within the thrust of a traditional proscenium arch stage and by lock-stepping him towards a standard monogamy contract. Tatum might report he’s pursuing a new viewpoint, but it seems conspicuously imposed by the written and unwritten politics of production that now determines what stories get green-lit. Hollywood has long policed itself with the notorious Hays Code to impose decency in film. It seems now it is doing the same with the social agenda code to impose conformity, comfort, and hypocritical prudishness towards sexuality, normalizing it into a wedlock narrative on-screen while dismantling traditional values off-screen.
Channing Tatum, the ever-charming dancer turned actor, still has all the moves ready to go in his hip pocket, even as he is sidelined to the director’s chair by her majesty, Maxandra. Incidentally, the two have about as much chemistry as Mike has ever had with his previous LTR candidates, which is to say, not much. Hayek mostly waltzes around, talking interminably about women deserving everything, while Tatum placates her, infantilizing himself in the process. It’s less than satisfying to see Mike so contained. For Mike only lives when he’s moving, not so much when he’s holding a coffee sweating out the choreography or hunched on a couch sweating out the nuptials. It would be like domesticating James Bond. Oh, right. Never mind. There's still a minimum quota of gyrating and ripped abs to deliver on the franchise’s promise, just as Bond still drives an Aston Martin and drinks Martinis. It’s just that Magic Mike, like the Bond franchise, has lost its salacious fun. Instead, it rips the magic out of your lap and puts it into a theatre show, locking it behind the footlights.
In the same way that James Bond recently became an underling at MI6 with a meaningless number as the franchise toasted to his death in its final frames, here, Mike’s existence extends only so far as Maxandra is willing to sanction him, in effect neutering and killing the magic of old. There’s a brief telling scene where she chastises Mike for his wandering eye, which he was not exhibiting with any marked degree. Instead, it was a projection of her jealousy towards the younger woman on stage whom Mike was directing. Mike may first offer his hand to get your perfunctory permission, but only if Max first gives him her consent.
The truth is, we don’t need Mike’s perfunctory gesture of permission. We already gave it implicitly by entering the building or inviting him over. By flipping the narrative, to prize the female pov, the franchise has ironically taken away the carefree bachelorette fun replete with raunchiness, sans contracts and permission, that it was already delivering in boundless female fun. It was just not sanctioned yet by Hollywood’s corporate machine drooling for it to be commodified into a year’s running IP extension exercise. Incidentally, the present West End theatrical run of Magic Mike is now selling tickets through the end of 2023.
To further pile on the irony, in the film's last moments, in true Freudian-slip fashion, the story pulls the rug out from under itself and its new woman-led narrative. It presents something closer to the truth in Tatum’s childish prank to pull a runner after the stage show. Hayek’s response feels like an unscripted reaction to this psyche! moment from Tatum4. The moment reads as purely candid, shot and framed like a reality TV moment, wide angle and uncut. The moment feels out of place and improvises. Unlike Dustin Hoffman’s most famously improvised line that still supported the narrative in ‘69s Midnight Cowboy (in another male hustler movie with a definitively grimmer take), “Hey, I’m walking here,” which he yelled to a New York cabbie that almost ran him over during filming, this moment doesn’t support the narrative but instead pulls the curtain back on the whole ruse. Mike is gaming Max while pretending he’s not, and Max is tacitly accepting it.
This momentary break cracks the façade of the fairytale. Max, in her way, is in a modern-day struggle from ingénue to a princess in this purported Last Dance. Through a drawn-out divorce, she is shedding her ogre of a husband, a media mogul one-percenter which arguably already makes her a queen. But true love is the barometer here. And in that department, married or not, Max is poverty-stricken. Her lack of either romantic or platonic love makes her heart bereft to the point of begging for a lap dance. However, given her economic riches, she can mold herself a dream guy by plucking out a handsome impoverished dancer. Mike Lane makes for the perfect candidate. He is challenged in both long-term relationships and long-term employment. This means he's available and has no options. It sounds like a winning deal for Max but less so for Mike if he values his independence. He doesn't yet see that in Max’s affluent cage5 he's poised for his longest dance yet, becoming a hen-pecked husband. No wonder he instinctively wants to run at the first chance he gets.
As a final flag of irony, in jeopardy of over-stating the issue, there’s a flagrant piece of twisted logic in the finale. Were it not for a knock-out female dancer named Ballerina, played by the sensational Kylie Shea, upstaging Mike, the film would remain a flaccid affair. Strangely Shea is not integrated into the story nor promoted in the marketing materials. Yet she completely steals her scene, bringing the rise in temperature this franchise was built to deliver. Without her, the film would be a flaccid attempt at a theatrical revamp. With her, it still has some heat. The chemistry between Tatum and Shea is palpable. In most other places, not so much.
Rating:
2/5
Thank you for reading! If you’ve seen Magic Mike’s Last Dance, or when you do, please share your thoughts with me. I’m curious how this film lands for you. Has my digging into the film’s constructs helped your viewing of it? Let me know.
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Salma Hayek has added a last name and now goes by Salma Hayek Pinault. However, this is a professional pseudonym. She is still listed solely as Salma Hayek on IMDb, with her three-name option listed as an AKA. I have therefore stuck with the shorter version as it is still her official personality name as her official Twitter is also under her original two-name billing.
Hayek stepped in on a dime after Thandiwe Newton walked off the production after 11 days of shooting. According to the British tabloids, she had a falling out with Tatum amidst her own marriage unraveling. Hayek, who resides in London, could quickly jump into the part, while also reshooting all of Newton’s scenes.
Interestingly, in Jupiter Ascending, 2015’s spectacularly lavish space opera film from The Wachowskis starring Channing Tatum, in which he did six months of stunt work as part of his acting duties, and perhaps from where this film riffs its fictitious title Isabelle Ascendant, the female ingénue Jupiter, played by Mila Kunis, faces the same choice. Only she doesn’t know the wealthy prince intends to murder her the moment she marries him. Tatum plays the romantic option of a warrior bent on protecting “her majesty.”
SPOILER: The moment I’m referring to is a major spoiler. After the stage show finishes. Max and Mike rush to find each other, and she tells him the divorce has left her penniless; Mike immediately says, “Oh, well, I’m sorry then.” And walks out of frame; the scene continues, uncut, resting on Hayek’s stunned reaction. She appears shocked and dumbfounded. A brief moment later, Mike reappears to let her off the hook and make like he’s pranking her with his reaction. Obviously, there are likely different takes on this moment, but the filmmakers chose to go with this one which has an uncanny improvised feel to it. However, in line with the overall story, it sticks out as a disingenuous reaction from Mike, who should not behave so callously while building their romantic trust. A genuine partner would want to demonstrate immediate support in a moment of deep vulnerability rather than pranking his partner. This is why I see it as exposing the disingenuous narrative the film has built up prior to this “Freudian slip” moment.
SPOILER: Despite the film’s bizarre claim of Max’s financial ruin in the last frames, which is inconsistent with reality, Mike has definitely hit the jackpot financially by marrying up with Max.
Thank you Malcolm - your amazing review is educational and entertaining - which this movie is not.
it.