So you think you can make a sequel? Don’t keep anything that made the first two films successful. Then cook up some dumb plot about a theater, a bored, rich housewife and you get “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”
Unable to catch a break from his dancing career, Mike (Channing Tatum) tends bar at exclusive parties and meets a socialite (Salma Hayek Pinault) who wants him to stage a show in London. Since she also wants other things – and throws a lot of money at him – he tries to recruit street dancers for what must be the dinkiest theater in town.
Rather than introducing the new team, director Steven Soderbergh lets them bump and grind in the shadows while Mike plays a stupid drama out front. Frankly, there’s not enough there.
A simple guy, Mike doesn’t think through his situation or consider what Pinault’s Maxandra Mendoza is up to. When he has a Zoom call with the old strippers, you wish they’d fly out and join him. Instead, this is a fairly concentrated story that needs an awful lot of hydration midway through.
To give the film a little “Bridgerton” class, Soderbergh employs a narrator who tries to make sense of the story. She offers her own take, then pulls back for those shirtless group numbers and water ballets.
While Pinault has the best shot at making something of the plot, she goes through the motions, plays the clichés and introduces her own “surprise” before that all-important premiere takes place. (If it hadn’t been released so long ago we swear “Showgirls” must have been inspiration.)
In The Ratigan (as that very famous, oh-so-dinky club is known), a good 50 or 60 people watch as the new Magic Mike dancers show off their abs and try not to fall off a newly constructed stage. They writhe with the best of them, then let the master have his moment in what must be the biggest water-filled pothole on stage.
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Nothing makes sense but Mike’s future seems set for at least a couple of years.
Tatum, who still has the moves that made him a star, brings nothing new to the character. Listed as a producer, he doesn’t exert too much energy until the end. Then, the clothes come off, water floods the stage and the pas de deux unfolds. It’s good, but it isn’t exactly the show that’s going to take London by storm. Tatum mumbles so much, he could have staged the second coming of Christ and we wouldn’t have gotten the picture.
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While this certainly puts a button on Mike’s career, there’s room for others to take his place.
“Magic Mike: The Next Generation”? It’s entirely possible.
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