Well, It Certainly Isn’t Hot Stuff
Steven Soderbergh has, to put it mildly, directed a lot of movies throughout his career—not even his alleged retirement from filmmaking a few years ago has slowed down his output in any discernible way. Of course, with that many titles under one’s belt, a few clinkers are bound to come up along the way but even then, his lesser works at least tend to show some degree of effort on his part—you generally get at least some sense of what he was trying to accomplish and it almost never feels as if he is simply going trough the motions. That is why Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third and purportedly final entry in the series of films that began with the 2012 hit Magic Mike and continued with 2015’s Magic Mike XXL (which he produced but did not direct) is such a peculiar film to watch. It is far from Soderbergh’s worst by a long shot and on some basic fundamental level, I suppose it is at least watchable. However, there is never a single moment in which he offers up any sort of evidence suggesting that this was a movie that needed to be made as anything other than a presumably big payday for himself and his chief collaborator on the films, Channing Tatum. Even the relatively undistinguished Magic Mike XXL felt more urgent—more like an actual Soderbergh film—than this dully formulaic programmer.
As the film opens, we learn that, like so many others, onetime stripper Mike Lane (Tatum) has fallen on hard times as a result of the pandemic—his furniture business has gone down the tubes—and he is now just getting by working as a bartender in Florida. His luck changes one day when his gig working at a fundraiser at a lavish estate results in a meeting with the woman hosting the affair, the wealthy Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault). Frustrated over dealing with her estranged husband, media mogul Roger Rattigan (Alan Cox), and having heard about Mike’s other set of skills from a still-satisfied customer, she offers him $6,000 for a single lap dance. Although he initially demurs, Mike takes her up on the offer and gives an epic performance that finds the two of them making extensive use of much of the furniture in her living room. The experience proves so thrilling for Maxandra that—her mind either cleared or clouded by what has just transpired—is struck with a brilliant idea that she wants Mike to help her bring to life by coming to London with her for the next month in exchange for a much-needed $60,000.
With nothing else going on, Mike agrees but while Maxandra makes it clear what the job does not entail—no sex is involved—she is somewhat fuzzy on what it is actually all about. As it turns out, as part of the separation agreement with her estranged husband, Maxandra was given control of the Rattigan, the theater where she once worked as an actress and where Roger met and wooed her 18 years earlier. Currently, the place is staging Isabel Ascendant, a twee bit of romantic piffle that is still attracting crowds, possibly out of curiosity that such out-of-date blandness could still be staged unironically in this day and age. The newly enlightened Maxandra has decided to scrap the show and spend the next month secretly preparing to stage a one-night-only strip show event designed to invert the old show’s question of whether the heroine will choose love or money by suggesting that she and all other women can now have whatever they want whenever they want it.
Mike will serve as the director of this bold new vision, which he only learns at the same time that she is informing the play’s cast and crew as to what is happening, though it is clear right from the outset that Maxandra is truly the one in charge. Nevertheless, with the entire original cast having resigned with the exception of its lead actress, Hannah (Juliette Motamed), Mike and Maxandra go about casting dancers and conceptualizing the show—which basically takes the original’s twee framework and then inserts elaborate erotic fantasy dances into it a la the reworking of the immortal Night Wind in S.O.B. (1981)—while occasionally butting heads as to what should go in. That is all that is butted between the two, even though Mike is staying at her house along with an overly gruff butler (Ayub Khan Din) and Zadie (Jemelia George), Maxandra’s teenage daughter who delivers an extended dissertation of the importance of dance throughout history that serves as the film’s intermittent narration. Naturally, there are obstacles along the way and there is also the issue of Mike’s insistence that he is only there to help stage the show and not actually perform in it. However, if you think that there is a possibility that the film ends with Isabel Descending Revelation not going on and Mike not hitting the stage one last time, you are probably too young to be attending this film in the first place.
Although it maybe titled Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the focus this time is squarely on Maxandra and her issue to the point where Mike at times almost feels like an afterthought. In that sense, it sort of makes this film the Fury Road of the franchise in the way that it shifts its titular hero to the sidelines in order to center on a new female character. In theory, this is actually a promising and potentially interesting move—considering that one of the themes of the first two entries has been the notion of women being able to give voice and agency to their own desires, doing that via a story with an actual female character front and center seems like a long-overdue no-brainer. And yet, Reed Carolin’s screenplay kind of drops the ball in this regard. Although Maxandra is presented as an initially forceful person who is nevertheless not entirely sure of what it is she actually wants, the script never really seems to have much of a fix on who she is supposed to be or her wants at any given time. As for the show, which is being created as a vessel to explore this idea, it doesn’t say much of anything either except for a few bits of blather delivered by Isabel that sound like those weird intros that David Duchovny used to deliver at the beginning of Red Shoe Diaries, sans the depth.
Of course, my guess is that most people contemplating seeing this film are less interested with notions of agency and whatnot—they are presumably more interested in the amount and effectiveness of what we might describe as The Good Parts. The first two films, whatever you might think of them, certainly had their share and with the presence of two of the sexiest and most charismatic screen performers around, one might rightly expect a number of Good Parts to be had here. Oddly, such things are in such startlingly short supply here, for reasons I cannot begin to understand. That initial lap dance between Mike and Maxanda is reasonably hot—although it goes on for so long and so thoroughly tests the structural integrity of the living room furniture that it almost feels as if Soderbergh is spoofing audience expectations—and ballerina Kylie Shea definitely steams up the screen when she shows up in the late innings to do her thing. Aside from those two moments, the erotic content of the film is so restrained to the point of being virtually nonexistent—one of the funniest jokes in the film, though largely inadvertent, comes when Maxandra is sitting in the audience with her butler and daughter and orders the former to cover the eyes of the latter during certain parts of the show, even though any computer-savvy modern teen like Zadie would have presumably seen steamier content than that even without hitting the porn sites. Frankly, the big show ends up looking like an extended ad for the Magic Mike show in Las Vegas—a simulacrum of sleaze that allows audience members to feels like they are experiencing something sexy and decadent without actually getting their hands dirty, so to speak.
The relative lack of Good Parts connect to the film’s biggest problem—Soderbergh’s weird but increasingly disconnected approach to the material. I wouldn’t say that the original Magic Mike was a film that he felt any deep kinship to but he found some interesting angles to take, such as connecting the commodification of desire to the fallout from the 2008 financial meltdown. Here, it is obvious almost from the start that this is just a paycheck gig for him that exists only to attract viewers who turned out in droves for the first two films and he has no real interest in making it into anything else. At first, he tries tying in current events once again with the news of Mike’s COVID-inspired business failure but it feels more like a contrivance than a point worth noting.
For the most part though, he is simply making something for the fan base but he then inexplicably seems to go out of his way to stymie anything resembling a conventional crowd-pleasing moment. There is a scene early on in which, following their arrival in London, Maxandra takes Mike to a high-class store to buy some clothes. In theory, this would set up a scene that inverts the infamous Pretty Woman trying-on-clothes montage by flipping the gender roles or, barring that, a sequence featuring Channing Tatum changing in and out of clothes, either one of which, I suppose, I suspect would pass muster with most of the target audience. Oddly, it doesn’t amount to anything—Mike looks at a price tag on a shirt and can’t believe how expensive it is and that is it. And while I would not dream of spoiling the details of the climactic dance sequence, I will simply note that there is one character who theoretically should be on that stage but isn’t, ruining what could have been a cathartic finale and allowing the film to conclude in such a rushed manner that you almost feel as if you missed something. He doesn’t even really attempt to connect the film to its predecessors—if you are hoping for appearances from his goofball crew from those past installments, the only thing on display is a brief scene featuring some of them on a group Zoom chat.
However, since Soderbergh—even when he is clearly disinterested and working on creative fumes—is a consummate professional as a filmmaker and since Tatum and Pinault have the kind of forceful personalities that shine even in the face of substandard material, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is sort of watchable without ever being particularly interesting and certainly never comes around to ever quite justifying its own existence. However, my guess is that even those who are eagerly waiting to see it are going to come away feeling a weird sense of disappointment over its lack of anything truly memorable. My guess is that it will have a big weekend or two at the box office and then fade into obscurity with only the two aforementioned dance sequences living on via YouTube. As for Soderbergh, this film will prove to be notable only because it is the one thing that I don’t think I have ever said about one of his movies in the past—a bore.