Magic Mike’s Last Dance is on Max, so go watch its one good scene

Compared to 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, was a box-office whiff. The third Magic Mike film is supposed as the ultimate installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a coronary heart of gold, a aspect enterprise in carpentry, and a totally explored philosophy about ladies’s pleasure. But in contrast to the earlier Magic Mike films, it by no means constructed a fandom or turned a middle of on-line dialogue.

Blame the eight-year hole between the final movie and this one. Blame the wrestle to get individuals to watch films in theatrical launch. Or extra precisely, simply blame the limitless issues with the film itself. But for no matter purpose, the movie barely made a ripple when it hit theaters in February 2023.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is now streaming on Max, the platform it was initially made for. Like any movie hitting streaming, it now has a brand new likelihood at discovering an viewers. But the Max launch isn’t more likely to transfer the needle a lot, given what a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed mission it is. Frankly, there’s solely one scene in Magic Mike’s Last Dance that’s actually price watching, at the very least for followers of the earlier films, and it comes early within the movie.

For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital renters), the sequence begins about eight minutes in, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is known as to satisfy together with his employer of the second, a wealthy, bored lady named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry enterprise below, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering firm Maxandra hires for her newest fundraising gig. Depressed over her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from one of Mike’s exes that he does a “silly dance” which may cheer her up. She’s prepared to supply him $6,000 for a non-public present.

Image: Warner Bros.

Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore — however lured by the cash and stung by the “silly dance” description, he alters his thoughts, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s home of potted vegetation and knickknacks, and offers her a solo efficiency that doesn’t even attempt to masquerade as something apart from extremely theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.

The scene is in actual fact a “silly dance,” however it’s the one a part of the film that actually feels just like the movies that preceded it — notably like Magic Mike XXL, with its prolonged lectures (a few of them in poetic type, delivered by Donald Glover) about how fulfilling ladies’s fantasies is a sacred artwork. Mike begins by pulling up his shirt and placing Maxandra’s hand on his abs as if that they had therapeutic powers. Then he climbs throughout her and her furnishings, treating her to a lap dance that features carrying her round together with his face buried in her crotch, doing pull-ups on her knickknack cabinets whereas she yanks his pants off, and crawling throughout a desk on all fours together with her below him, pushing her alongside the floor together with his groin.

It’s all faintly hilarious. For these able to shopping for into the fantasy it’s promoting, it’s additionally form of attractive, if solely as a result of each of the performers have the bodily power and beauty to tug off these sorts of strikes. And if nothing else, it’s a prerequisite for diving into the widely humorous interviews the actors have completed in regards to the expertise of filming it. Either manner, the scene is handled with the straight-faced, near-religious gravity the Magic Mike films have all the time delivered to sensual dance routines. The actors are principally miming slow-motion, acrobatic intercourse, whereas preserving their garments on and their faces solemn.

The remainder of the film is only a downhill run, beginning with the shot instantly after the dance sequence, the place it turns into clear that Mike and Maxandra adopted their mimed intercourse with precise intercourse. Which is positive, besides that from there, audiences are requested to consider that Mike has fallen for Maxandra and can do something to remain in a relationship together with her, despite the fact that she’s unstable, manipulative, dishonest, abusive, and above all, written so shallowly and erratically that it’s onerous to see the attraction. Especially since Mike himself appears extra like a prop than a presence for many of this film. The carpentry work that outlined him in Magic Mike is gone. The associates who outlined him in Magic Mike XXL have been sidelined, aside from a quickie Zoom check-in to acknowledge they exist. His philosophizing about his function on the planet is over. All that defines him on this film is his romance with Maxandra — which, inexplicably, is framed and narrated in elaborately poetic, nonsensical language by Maxandra’s prickly teen daughter.

Photo: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

More considerably, the film was expressly constructed round selling the real-life Magic Mike Live stage present, and it offers the primary characters fairly minimal and uninteresting arcs whereas it focuses on their efforts to supply an identical strip efficiency. The film’s massive climax is a prolonged dance efficiency by a bunch of latest performers who largely don’t even get character names, not to mention personalities. (Fair discover: Other Polygon viewers favored it greater than I did. If you’re positive with the shortage of stakes or specifics for that sequence, and simply need spectacle, staging, and a few muscular guys taking off their shirts, it begins simply earlier than the 88-minute mark.)

Tatum dances once more in that sequence, and the choreography is compelling — he and dance accomplice Kylie Shea, who additionally by no means will get a personality title, slide round throughout a moist stage collectively. But there’s no sense of stakes in any of it, aside from the query of whether or not Mike and Maxandra’s underdeveloped, disagreeable relationship will proceed, or they’ll break up up after the present.

That’s the enjoyable of streaming, although — viewers can dip out and in at leisure, and focus on the enjoyable bits with out committing to the tedious ones. They may store round for one thing extra fulfilling to watch after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic routine is over. The authentic Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL are additionally each on Max — and on Netflix, in addition to many digital rental platforms.