The irony of Steven Soderbergh making a movie about somebody’s last dance should be apparent. Since first mentioning his “retirement” in 2011—a headline-grabbing claim that was eventually downgraded or rephrased into a five-year “exit plan” or “sabbatical”—the Oscar-winning writer-director has churned out 13 feature films, working at a rate that not only shames most of his big-name Hollywood peers but that would have been competitive with the studio hands of old. At this point in a career defined as much by productivity and eclecticism as excellence, moviemaking is something that seemingly comes easily to Soderbergh. Which may be why, despite his ability to make almost effortlessly entertaining genre riffs, he needs to find ways to complicate the matter, whether in his choice of technology (High Flying Bird) or subject matter (Che), or by trying to talk himself out of the game altogether.
The theme of reluctant or compulsive virtuosity has always been present in Soderbergh’s cinema, which often embraces characters drawn to replicating past triumphs: not just Danny Ocean and the gang or the recidivist hoods of Out of Sight and Logan Lucky, but also Meryl Streep’s out-of-circulation author in Let Them All Talk, who’s perpetually sweating her literary legacy. Even Magic Mike XXL found its namesake out of practice for reasons residing somewhere between boredom and alienation—at least until a late-night welding session to the strains of Ginuwine’s “Pony” got his creative juices flowing again.
It’s worth taking a minute to say that Magic Mike XXL—which was not actually directed by Soderbergh, but was produced, shot, and edited by him under the supervision of helmer Gregory Jacobs—is not only the best film of the trilogy but also one of the most charming American studio comedies of the millennium, a deceptively ramshackle road movie whose themes basically boil down to “the boys!” In the first Magic Mike, Tatum’s Mike Lane is the star of the Xquisite Strip Club in Tampa, toiling under the supervision of Matthew McConaughey’s megalomaniacal MC Dallas; he’s tight with the other members of his troupe, but the film is mainly structured as a character study–slash–romance, juxtaposing Mike’s somewhat sullen need for professional independence against his attraction to a fellow dancer’s older sister.
Set pointedly in the aftermath of the late-2000s recession, Magic Mike was an economically inflected parable about independent contracting and the gig economy: Its fleshy come-ons were cold to the touch. Happily, the sequel went all in on the utopian fantasy of male stripping as the world’s most wholesome fraternity, jettisoning the hard-selling, Oscar-baiting McConaughey (and his callow protégé, played by Alex Pettyfer) and strengthening Mike’s bond with the leftover himbos, each of whom were subsequently allowed to come into their own as characters. The plot—about getting to Myrtle Beach for some kind of convention—was nothing more than a pretense to cycle between scenes of the actors bro-ing down and set pieces in which they do their thing for crowds of deeply appreciative women (and, quite wonderfully, the LGBTQ-heavy audience at a drag pageant). In the very best of these set pieces, Joe Manganiello’s Metallica-shirted Big Dick Richie pulls out a Backstreet Boys classic to get a smile from a catatonic convenience-store worker—a minor but hard-earned victory that his Xquisite brethren celebrate like a Super Bowl–winning field goal.
In all seriousness—and Magic Mike XXL is a completely serious movie in addition to being a goofy one—the idea that Richie’s snack-assisted striptease offers a route toward self-actualization is what makes his performance so weirdly moving. After years of Backdraft-style cosplay on stage, he’s ready to embrace his real creative identity: “I’m not a fucking fireman,” he cries. “I’m a fucking male entertainer!” (The song he’s chosen has his back: He wants it that way.) By the end of Magic Mike XXL, every member of the gang—even Kevin Nash’s 7-foot team mascot, Tarzan—has developed a stage routine geared toward their true passions, which not only humanizes their collective mechanical bump and grind, but makes it feel like art. The movie is slight, but genuinely triumphant. Like Richie’s convenience-store schtick, it’s impossible not to smile at. (And Manganiello should have won an Oscar just for his line reading of “How much for the Cheetos and water?”)
The two most interesting things about Magic Mike’s Last Dance—Mike’s embrace of his creative muse and the performances geared toward female pleasure—are holdovers from XXL and, accordingly, feel redundant. It doesn’t help that the script’s big swing, which finds Mike shanghaied to London by his deep-pocketed, mid-divorce-proceedings lover (Salma Hayek), takes the action out of Florida—a backdrop rendered with loving, sociological precision in the first two installments—and into fish-out-of-water comic territory that’s beneath the talent here. Having Tatum act flummoxed by stiff English manners and customs is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff; all that’s missing is a scene in which Mike tries to drive on the wrong side of the road. As for Hayek’s memorably named Maxandra Mendoza, despite every effort to make her into a sympathetic, complex character—a passionate impresario who falls in love with people and causes so impulsively that her teenage daughter calls her “the queen of the first act”—she’s ultimately little more than a device, a gorgeous cipher waving a blank check at Mike (and Soderbergh) so they can do whatever they want in the theater she’s inherited from her philandering, super-rich husband.
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Talking to The Ringer for the oral history of Magic Mike, Soderbergh explained that he hadn’t thought of doing a third Magic Mike movie until he caught the stage show that Tatum and choreographer Alison Faulk had developed—at which point he not only returned to the project but also decided to shape it around his enthusiasm for their work. Hence the notion that Maxandra has hired Mike not as a private dancer but as a director and choreographer—he’s there to reimagine a stodgy (but successful) costume drama as a postmillennial strip show, a thumb in the eye of convention and a fuck-you to generations of dramas about women forced to choose between love and money. Maxandra’s only marching orders to Mike are to create a revue where the women in the audience are made to feel like they can have whatever they want.
Mike, who’s had enough experience with wealthy patrons to know when he’s being used, recognizes that Maxandra mostly wants to get back at her ex. But he’s also moved that his new backer sees enough in him to trot him out before her high-society friends as an auteur. The problem is that he isn’t quite sure what he wants his new take on the show to be—and, without being too cute about it, neither does Soderbergh. If it’s possible for a movie to feel like it’s being made up as it goes along, Last Dance qualifies, but the looseness isn’t endearing. Taken on a scene-by-scene basis, a lot of it is funny enough, like the inevitable putting-together-a-team montage that sees Tatum and Hayek auditioning a series of strapping (and insanely flexible) male dancers, or an intentionally Oceans-ish interlude in which Mike’s charges seduce a dowdy government inspector on a double-decker bus to secure her red stamp on an important building document. But the overall arc of Mike’s evolution from tired-out dancer to Fosse-style visionary is unconvincing, and so is Tatum’s chemistry with Hayek, who’s constantly let down by Reid Carolin’s screenplay. In Magic Mike XXL, the characters played by Jada Pinkett Smith and Andie MacDowell simultaneously dignified and eroticized the theme of guiltless, luxurious desire; caught between teary speeches and goofy slapstick, Hayek is simply defeated by the material.
Tatum, at least, wrestles his scenes to a draw. With apologies to Hail Caesar’s secretly Soviet Burt Gurney (and his indelible rendition of the seamen’s lament “No Dames!”), Mike Lane will probably always be Tatum’s signature role, but that’s why it’s so frustrating that even his two major dance numbers—choreographed as mirror images of each other and intercut dexterously during the film’s climax—are less than stellar. It’s telling that the only scene in which Tatum conjures up something close to his usual peak likability is on a Zoom call with the XXL gang—a short, tossed-off sequence whose charm ultimately serves as a reminder of the potentially better movie we’re not seeing. As for the one we are, it ends with the kind of profound shrug that suggests that nobody’s really manning the quality-control filter at this point. Whether Last Dance’s tacit acknowledgment of its own disposability registers as a gesture of honesty or of contempt is up to you.
