Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike surreptitiously smuggled the filmmaker’s interest in the labor aspects of sex work under a façade of goofy male stripper fu. The 2015 sequel, Magic Mike XXL, which was shot and edited by Soderbergh and directed by Gregory Jacobs, pivoted into an enthusiastic celebration of female desire and the reward of performing one’s art for its own sake as much as money. Now, Soderbergh returns to the director’s chair for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, marking yet another shift in direction toward an oddly melancholic rumination on the difficulties of middle-aged self-actualization.
The film finds Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) in the aftermath of yet another economic crisis, what with the pandemic having claimed his custom furniture business and left the former stripper to bartend in order to make ends meet. But after working a party for a rich divorcée, Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault), he gets lured back into the world of dancing.
As he did in the prior Magic Mike films, Soderbergh captures Mike in long takes that linger on every contortion of his body. And as he performs for Max at her party, we also get reaction shots of the woman’s wide-eyed awe and lust. Overcome with infatuation, Max impulsively invites Mike to accompany her to London to help revamp the theater (which was given to her by her estranged husband) and its stuffy period dramas, so as to bring exotic dance to the West End.
The desperate undertones of Max’s instant attachment to Mike, as well as the parasocial need that it suggests, open an interesting avenue of exploration for the maker of The Girlfriend Experience. But Magic Mike’s Last Dance doesn’t commit to fully exploring this path, instead oscillating between treating Max’s fixation on Mike as alternately sad and innocent, and in a way that effectively transforms the film into a tonally confused romantic comedy.
This is a woeful development for a series whose least interesting element has always been its main character’s romantic entanglements, which have consistently lacked the chemistry that Mike shares with his posse of himbo buddies. That group of male dancers is missing from Magic Mike’s Last Dance, leaving no counterweight for his dalliance with Max.
Throughout, Tatum and Hayek Pinault never generate any meaningful frisson, which causes the film to regularly grind to a halt when Mike and Max attempt to define their relationship. Not helping matters is how their moments of flirtatious repartee are constantly balanced against Mike’s ongoing crisis of confidence as he faces getting older, which is treated with a leaden somberness rather than a more buoyant sense of self-effacement.
When the film mounts a dance sequence, it reflects some of the spirit of its predecessors. Soderbergh’s enduring love of off-kilter compositions, precisely timed editing, and an overriding interest in the nuts and bolts of any kind of professionalism treats the dancers’ bodies as subjects for study, the camera studiously capturing each gyration and smooth glide.
Mike’s early dance in Max’s house makes such excellent use of the layout and decor of the room that a nondescript McMansion parlor feels like it was designed expressly for his performance. And the film’s climactic final half-hour reorients much of the Magic Mike Live stage show in London around Soderbergh’s propensity for artistic flourishes, with the camera movements as fluid as the dance moves that they track and a culminating expression of all the film’s emotional beats into an interpretative dance as emotionally resonant as it is erotic.
In between these two jubilant bookends, though, is more than an hour of sedentary narrative mechanics that unpack Mike and Max’s separate crises of confidence as they face the prospect of starting over at an age where they thought they would be past such anxieties. By never quite committing to either the surface-level neo-screwball antics of the obsessed Max or to a more serious scrutiny of her struggle with codependency, Magic Mike’s Last Dance ends up shrouded in an atmosphere of emotional ambiguity, while its devotion to plot is counterintuitive for a series that’s inherently about embracing freedom from expectation.
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