In comparison with 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Final Dance, was a box-office whiff. The third Magic Mike film is meant 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. However not like the earlier Magic Mike motion pictures, 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 observe motion pictures in theatrical launch. Or extra precisely, simply blame the limitless issues with the film itself. However for no matter motive, the movie barely made a ripple when it hit theaters in February 2023.
Magic Mike’s Final Dance is now streaming on Max, the platform it was initially made for. Like all movie hitting streaming, it now has a brand new likelihood at discovering an viewers. However the Max launch isn’t prone to transfer the needle a lot, given what a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed venture it’s. Frankly, there’s just one scene in Magic Mike’s Final Dance that’s actually price watching, a minimum of for followers of the earlier motion pictures, 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, known as to fulfill together with his employer of the second, a wealthy, bored girl named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry enterprise beneath, 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 among Mike’s exes that he does a “foolish dance” which may cheer her up. She’s prepared to supply him $6,000 for a non-public present.
![Channing Tatum’s Mike, now with a buzz cut, holds up his shirt so Salma Hayek’s character can touch his abs in Magic Mike’s Last Dance](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8Gx5uAH2p5Bk6k87l98TaJwefL4=/0x0:2064x1500/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2064x1500):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24162435/MMLD_FF_01680049rc_2_.jpg)
Picture: Warner Bros.
Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore — however lured by the cash and stung by the “foolish dance” description, he alters his thoughts, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s home of potted crops and knickknacks, and offers her a solo efficiency that doesn’t even attempt to masquerade as something aside from extremely theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.
The scene is the truth is a “foolish dance,” nevertheless it’s the one a part of the film that actually feels just like the movies that preceded it — significantly like Magic Mike XXL, with its prolonged lectures (a few of them in poetic kind, 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 along with her beneath 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 type of horny, if solely as a result of each of the performers have the bodily energy and charm to drag off these sorts of strikes. And if nothing else, it’s a prerequisite for diving into the widely humorous interviews the actors have achieved in regards to the expertise of filming it. Both manner, the scene is handled with the straight-faced, near-religious gravity the Magic Mike motion pictures have at all times dropped at 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 ok, besides that from there, audiences are requested to imagine that Mike has fallen for Maxandra and can do something to remain in a relationship along with her, although she’s risky, manipulative, dishonest, abusive, and above all, written so shallowly and erratically that it’s onerous to see the enchantment. Particularly 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 chums who outlined him in Magic Mike XXL have been sidelined, other than a quickie Zoom check-in to acknowledge they exist. His philosophizing about his function on this 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.
![A Black male dancer in jeans and a backward baseball cap leaps high in the air as other male dancers crouch behind him on a blue-lit stage criss-crossed with bright white spotlights in a scene from Magic Mike’s Last Dance](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7cLUhPOdcmVKcDbDNNYNHqzCFUU=/0x0:2000x1062/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2000x1062):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24699537/Dance.jpeg)
Photograph: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Assortment
Extra considerably, the film was expressly constructed round selling the real-life Magic Mike Stay stage present, and it provides the primary characters fairly minimal and uninteresting arcs whereas it focuses on their efforts to provide an analogous strip efficiency. The film’s huge climax is a prolonged dance efficiency by a bunch of latest performers who principally don’t even get character names, not to mention personalities. (Honest discover: Different Polygon viewers favored it greater than I did. When you’re high-quality with the dearth 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 companion Kylie Shea, who additionally by no means will get a personality title, slide round throughout a moist stage collectively. However there’s no sense of stakes in any of it, other than 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 deal with the enjoyable bits with out committing to the tedious ones. They will additionally store round for one thing extra pleasurable to observe after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic routine is over. The unique Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL are additionally each on Max — and on Netflix, in addition to many digital rental platforms.