Magic Mike’s Last Dance is on Max, so watch a good scene of it

Compared to 2015 Magic Mike XXLsequel to Steven Soderbergh, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, was a box office craze. 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 side job as a carpenter, and a thoroughly explored philosophy. about women’s pleasure. But unlike previous Magic Mike movies, it never built a fandom or became the center of online discussion.

Blame the eight year gap between the last movie and this one. Blame struggling to get people to watch movies in theaters. Or more accurately, just blame the myriad problems with the movie itself. But for whatever reason, the film barely resonated when it hit theaters in February 2023.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance currently streaming on Max, the platform it was originally created for. Like any movie streamed, it now has a new opportunity to find an audience. But the Max release doesn’t have the ability to move the needle much, so it’s a half-baked, calculated, and unsettling project. Honestly, there’s only one scene in Magic Mike’s Last Dance it’s really worth a look, at least for fans of the previous films, and it shows up early in the movie.

For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital tenants), the sequence begins in about eight minutes, when Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is called to meet his employer on At that time, a rich, bored woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID has dragged Mike’s carpentry business downhill, and he’s working odd jobs, such as bartending for the catering company Maxandra hired for her latest fundraising gig. that. Depressed by an impending divorce, Maxandra hears from one of Mike’s exes that he did a “silly dance” to cheer her up. She was willing to pay him $6,000 for a private gig.

Image: Warner Bros.

Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore – but intrigued by the money and impressed by the description of the “silly dance”, he changed his mind, clearing out potted plants and sundries in his home. Maxandra, while giving her a solo performance that isn’t. didn’t even try to dress up as anything other than the highly theatrical, movie-only foreplay.

The scene is, in fact, a “silly dance,” but it’s a part of the movie that’s really like the movies before it—especially like Magic Mike XXL, with lengthy lectures (some in verse form, by Donald Glover) on how satisfying women’s fantasies was a sacred art. Mike started by pulling up his shirt and placing Maxandra’s hands on his abs as if they had healing powers. He then climbed all over her and her belongings, treated her to a thigh dance that included carrying her around with his face buried in her crotch, performing pull-ups on the sundries shelf. of her while she pulled his pants off and crawled across the table on all fours with her under him, pushing her along the surface with his groin.

It’s all dimly hilarious. For those who can afford to buy into the fantasy, it’s selling well, it’s also pretty sexy, if only because both performers have the physical strength and grace to execute these types of moves. . And if nothing else, that is a prerequisite for diving in Interviews are generally funny the actors did about the experience of filming it. Either way, the scene is handled with the almost frank, almost religious seriousness with which the Magic Mike movies always deliver sexy dance moves. Essentially, the actors are mimicking acrobatic, slow-motion sex acts, while keeping their clothes and dignified faces intact.

The rest of the movie is just a run downhill, starting with the shot right after the dance scene, where it’s clear that Mike and Maxandra have followed their fake sex with actual sex. That’s fine, except that from then on, the audience is asked to believe that Mike has fallen in love with Maxandra and would do anything to maintain a relationship with her, even though she’s fickle, manipulative, no honest, abusive and above all, very shallowly written. and so erratic that it’s hard to see attraction. Especially since Mike himself seems more like a prop than a presence for most of this movie’s length. Carpentry work identified him in Magic Mike disappeared. Friends who defined him in Magic Mike XXL have been dropped, apart from registering the Quick Zoom to confirm that they exist. His philosophy about his role in the world is over. All that defines him in this film is his romance with Maxandra – inexplicable, framed and narrated in poetic, meaningless language elaborately by her daughter. Maxandra’s prickly teenage girl.

Photo: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

More importantly, the film is clearly built around promoting real life Magic Mike Live stage show, and it gives the main characters pretty minimal and uninteresting arcs while it focuses on their attempt to create a similar striptease performance. The film’s big climax is a lengthy dance by a new group of artists, most of whom don’t even know the characters’ names let alone personalities. (Fair notice: Other Polygon viewers liked it better than I did. If you’re okay with the lack of stakes or specifics for that scene, and just want the spectacle, the staging, and some basic guys. pops off his shirt, it will start just before the 88-minute mark.)

Tatum dances back in that sequence, and the choreography is fascinating — he and his partner Kylie Shea, who also never had a character’s name, slide around the wet stage together. But there’s no stake in that, except for the question of whether Mike and Maxandra’s uneasy, underdeveloped relationship will continue or if they’ll break up after the show.

Still, that’s what’s fun about streaming — viewers can watch and watch in comfort and focus on the fun without having to worry about the tedious stuff. They might also be looking for something more fun to watch after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic show is over. Original Magic Mike And Magic Mike XXL also available on Max — and on Netflix, as well as many digital rental platforms.