What a unicorn is to a tech startup, Magic Mike is to the modern movie franchise. What began as a self-funded, $7 million venture has since ballooned into three movies, hundreds of millions of dollars in box office earnings, and a live show with a Vegas residency and an active tour. Without a superhero, without source material, and without a reverse-engineered “universe,” Magic Mike became a phenomenon now entering its second decade. But what director Steven Soderbergh, star Channing Tatum, and writer Reid Carolin have built is more than a financial feat. Magic Mike is the only pop culture property of its size and scale dedicated to promoting women’s pleasure, a fact its conclusion, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, wears like a badge of honor.
It didn’t start out that way. The original Magic Mike was a bleak postrecession parable of economic instability that happened to star male strippers. Partly inspired by Tatum’s own time as a dancer in Tampa, Magic Mike’s namesake is an aspiring furniture designer unable to secure a small-business loan. Instead, he earns cash—mostly singles—at a local nightclub. The owner, played by Matthew McConaughey, gives a speech about the escape his workers offer to their repressed, unfulfilled clientele, but the rest of Magic Mike aims to puncture the fantasy its performers build onstage. The so-called Kings of Tampa mostly go through the motions, quite literally pumping themselves up in a fluorescent-lit locker room before dance routines, which are edited into a monotonous montage. Perks like drugs and women prove more trouble than they’re worth. In the end, strippers are as alienated from their labor as any other cog in the capitalist machine. “I am not my goddamn job,” Mike insists. “It is what I do, but it’s not who I am.”
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In Magic Mike XXL, however, a job becomes a calling. As a movie, XXL is almost radical in its utter lack of stakes. After leaving the industry at the end of the first film, Mike tags along with his former coworkers for one last ride, joining them on a road trip to a competition in Myrtle Beach. Carolin and director Gregory Jacobs, Soderbergh’s longtime collaborator, could’ve made minimal adjustments to give the plot some urgency: Mike’s business is struggling; maybe some prize money could get him back on his feet. But there’s no point to this journey besides a love of the game, which starts to feel like a point in itself. When Joe Manganiello’s Big Dick Richie does an elaborate striptease in a gas station just to make the attendant smile, the scene stands in for the entire enterprise. The movie is here to have a good time—and make sure we do, too.
XXL could be seen as a betrayal, backing off of Magic Mike’s initial darkness in favor of pure, uncritical populism that’s easier to monetize as a modern-day Chippendales. (In Magic Mike, a friend’s side hustle dealing ecstasy ends with Mike losing his life savings; in Magic Mike XXL, the gang rolls face for a laugh.) But while XXL pivots from its predecessor’s themes, it commits to a new set of equally worthwhile ones. If “I am not my job” was Magic Mike’s mission statement, XXL’s, as delivered by Donald Glover, has a different focus. “These girls have to deal with men in their lives who, every day, they don’t listen to them. They don’t ask them what they want,” his character, a singer at a Savannah club, observes. “All we gotta do is ask them what they want, and when they tell you, it’s a beautiful thing. We’re like healers or something.” Or, as Richie repeatedly self-identifies, “male entertainers.”
There are precious few movies these days that cater primarily to adults, and even fewer that cater specifically to women. (Though Last Dance arrives just a week after 80 for Brady, so perhaps the tide is turning.) Magic Mike is not quite an antidote to the disappearance of sex from mainstream culture, as symbolized by the decline of the erotic thriller; Mike’s love interests in the first two films are ancillary at best, his liaisons are left entirely off-screen, and even his most salacious routines are undercut by self-conscious silliness. But a neutered, nonthreatening air is part of the value proposition. In Magic Mike, performances are played down to emphasize their less than ideal environment. In XXL, the camerawork—Soderbergh stuck around as cinematographer and editor under two different pseudonyms—is much more sensual, but there’s also a heightened sense of fun and frivolity to put the viewer at ease. XXL may pander to the moviegoer who took exactly the wrong message away from Magic Mike, but that audience is rarely pandered to anywhere else.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance leans even harder into the ethos of XXL, but with less impressive results. Mike’s furniture shop has now folded entirely. At a bartending gig in a bayfront mansion, a former client introduces him to Max (Salma Hayek), a bored and wealthy divorcée so taken with her first private lap dance that she flies Mike out to London with her. (Relatable!) But Mike isn’t just there to be Max’s kept man; she also puts him to work choreographing and directing a brand-new burlesque show hosted in an old West End theater she snagged in the settlement. “This show is not about getting dick … only,” she insists. XXL may have shifted its focus from the plight of male strippers to the service they provide, but it was still told largely from their point of view. Last Dance puts the customer in charge.
Given that Magic Mike is already a popular stage show in real life, this plot is rather meta, not to mention self-congratulatory. (The website for Magic Mike Live bills itself as Last Dance’s “inspired origin story.”) The self-congratulation would be less glaring if Magic Mike’s Last Dance actually delivered on Max’s ambitions. It’s already odd enough to take a quintessentially American story—Gig work! Shameless exhibitionism! Florida!—and drag it across the pond. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, though, Magic Mike loses its mojo. Max insists on hiring trained dancers, not strippers, a somewhat classist move that gets no pushback from Mike. Unsurprisingly, the new recruits bring little heat, perhaps because they’re also pretty anonymous. XXL was a kind of himbo Avengers, building the Kings of Tampa out into a proper ensemble; between the first two movies, for example, Matt Bomer’s bland Ken doll transformed into a blissed-out hippie. By contrast, none of Last Dance’s additions are cultivated into true characters. When the Kings drop in via Zoom for a single scene, they bring more personality and charisma than the London crew does in an hour and a half.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance may center Max, but the story isn’t technically told from her point of view. Max’s teenage daughter, Zadie (Jemelia George), provides the voiceover, a framing device as baffling in its contents as in its point of view. Not only does Zadie subject us to her armchair philosophy on the nature of dance (“What are we to make of the word ‘love’ in the context of dancing?”), she’s also an actual child Mike makes leave the room before the, uh, climax of his show. Why would this character, neither artist nor aficionado, have any particular insight into what makes Mike so magical? Zadie is observant, making precocious quips about economic inequality. But she’s too young to observe Mike with the female gaze the movie theoretically exists to satisfy.
Despite such strange acts of self-sabotage, Last Dance has moments of invoking its predecessors, if not quite living up to them. Mike’s first dance for Max is genuinely hot, an acrobatic act of seduction that makes you giggle and gasp all at once. Later, Juliette Motamed of the wonderful We Are Lady Parts appears as an actress in Mike and Max’s show who also serves as an audience surrogate. Fed up with a lack of options, in romance and in life, her character, Hannah, loses herself in a fantasy world of bare abs, sensual touch, and most of all, her own desires. Giddy, lascivious, and appropriately appreciative of Tatum’s ass, Motamed echoes our own response to the events on-screen. More than Max or Zadie, it’s Hannah who proves the potential of putting women at the center of the Magic Mike universe—not just in terms of who it’s marketed to, but in what happens on-screen.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance ends its trilogy on a downbeat. It’s the weakest of the three films by far, while also getting just enough right to make us preemptively mourn their absence. However imperfectly executed, the idea of honoring women’s desire is still a novel premise for a stand-alone project, let alone a whole blockbuster saga. Last Dance attempts to dramatize its series’ own success; in the process, it may overcomplicate the appeal. You don’t have to dissect why something works. The spectacle can speak for itself, especially for those who aren’t often spoken to.