Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a confounding wreck

There are some pretty clear expectations of a Magic Mike movie and if you’re going to subvert them, you better bring it.

Magic Mike's Last Dance is in cinemas now. Picture: Warner Bros

In the 10 years since the first Magic Mike swaggered onto the scene, the Channing Tatum movies have left an impression.

Maybe that impression is his rock hard eight-pack, forever cast in the minds of swooning audiences.

But it’s also that here was a movie franchise which made no apologies for its characters’ ambitions. It didn’t diminish or mock their unconventional line of work. It took pleasure in it, and it took pleasure in fulfilling women’s pleasure, and servicing their gaze.

Drink it in, Magic Mike said. Revel in it and have fun.

Steven Soderbergh didn’t direct the second movie, which upped the ante in its exuberance, but he did lens it as the cinematographer. So it still looked like a Soderbergh movie, even as it burst out of any restraints, like a glittering stud prancing onstage and daring you to look away.

In between the 2015 sequel and Magic Mike’s Last Dance, this final instalment in the trilogy, Tatum launched Magic Mike Live, a stripper-cum-cabaret performance which has been staged in many cities, including Sydney and Melbourne.

Magic Mike's Last Dance is the final movie in the trilogy. Picture: Warner Bros

Soderbergh, inspired by the sexual energy of the live show, has essentially created a fictional origin story for the performance. And the results are a grab-bag mess in which it’s sometimes sensual, sometimes magic and mostly a wreck.

There is more that confounds, befuddles and frustrates than enchants or titillates.

Picking up some years after that road show, Mike Lang (Tatum) is behind a bar in a black and white uniform when his business goes bust. While on a catering job, he meets Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), a very rich divorcee who’s looking for a little relief – and she’s heard Mike performs miracles.

After one very passionate encounter, she offers him an opportunity. She wants him to come with her to London, and help her put together a stripper show for a classic theatre she wrangled from her ex-husband in the settlement.

Mike reluctantly agrees, beguiled by her wiles and the promised $60,000 payday. They recruit the best (and most attractive) dancers while (surprise!) also falling for each other in a hot and heavy way.

Salma Hayek replaced Thandiwe Newton on Magic Mike's Last Dance. Picture: Warner Bros

There are some obstacles they’ll have to overcome – otherwise it really wouldn’t have an arc – but the film ends with a 30-minute set-piece that amounts to Soderbergh recreating beat-for-beat performances from the actual live show as the show-within-the-movie.

Where the movie sometimes works is that there are these languid yet charged scenes between Tatum and Hayek where they’re just talking, and it’s low-key but weirdly compulsive.

Soberbergh loves a two-hander dialogue piece and there are moments when it feels like his recent lo-fi works such High Flying Bird or Let Them All Talk. There’s a rhythm to it, but if you start to think about it a bit, these scenes in Magic Mike’s Last Dance don’t actually say anything.

Magic Mike's Last Dance recreates the live show’s dance numbers. Picture: Warner Bros

Still, in the moment, you feel like you’ve walked into a different Soderbergh movie and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But the laid-back energy doesn’t really work with your expectations of a Magic Mike movie where you want it to be raucous, especially in those final dance numbers.

They’re so muted and toned-down, almost as if they’re happening at a distance. It’s such a waste. These scenes should be intimate and grand, inviting you into a secret club, instead of an intellectual exercise to appreciate.

It’s missing that up-close embrace, and when you couple that with the fact Hayek and Tatum’s chemistry doesn’t quite gel, or that there is a very strange choice of voiceover narration from a character framing the story as almost a romantic fairytale, then the mishmash becomes more like chaos.

And there’s nothing sexual about that.

Rating: 2/5

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is in cinemas now

Originally published as Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a confounding wreck