As a responsible news organ, we should issue a content warning for the third – and allegedly final – film in Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper sequence. If you want Channing Tatum to grind his crotch in your face for two hours (why would you not?) then... well, you had better look elsewhere. Originally planned as an HBO Max release co-starring Thandie Newton, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is, mildly lubricious top and tail excepted, the most chaste sequel you’ll see this side of FernGully 2: The Magical Rescue.
We begin as we don’t mean to go on with the splendidly named Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), a hyper-rich media magnate, persuading Mike Lane (Tatum), now a bartender, to indulge her with one of his trademark sinewy lapdancers. This will do nicely. They grapple their way around her luxury apartment with an enthusiasm that is no less steamy for being conspicuously choreographed.
Everything then cools down for another hour and a half. The couple hotfoot it to London’s West End where Maxandra presses Mike into invigorating an apparently staid play called Isabel Ascendent with his creative disrobing. As tensions mount between impresario and her talent, one might reasonably expect a cineaste like Soderbergh to lean into Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, but the director, a aficionado of Dick Lester’s swinging London, gives us something closer to a Cliff Richard flick. There is even a subplot involving a crusty lady from the council (Vicki Pepperdine, no less) who, initially eager to shut the plucky kids down, gets won over by a dance on one of London’s double-decker buses. Awright, guvnor?
Last Dance is frightfully indulgent, but, this being Soderbergh, it is also studded with delightful outbreaks of invention. In an ideal world it would not be worth mentioning that the most glamorous couple of the month comprises a quadragenarian man and a quinquagenarian woman.
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Hayek, in particular, is gifted the most elegant framing and flattering angles. A single shot of her set against a rain-splattered taxi window is sufficiently evocative to justify much of the surrounding meta-faff (theatre mavens will enjoy chewing over the decision to have her married to a “Rattigan” and have her run a theatre in his name).
We do eventually get to see Channing ripple his torso in a rainy closing number that bears comparison with the best sequences in the first film. But the paucity of such set pieces suggests the creative team are fighting to maintain interest in their high concept. “The sexiest act of submission is asking for permission,” someone ventures. Is it? Maybe? I dunno. Yes, best leave it at that.
