Magic Mike bids farewell with a ‘Last Dance’

The words Magic Mike may conjure up images of sweaty, sculpted, undulating men, dancing unthreateningly for hoards of screaming women, but there has always been a backdrop of brutal economic reality looming over the fantasy world.

The unlikely franchise has explored the escalating devaluation of physical labourers, the suffocating effects of the college industrial complex, predatory loan businesses, recession and even COVID-19, which has effectively destroyed poor Mike Lane’s furniture business in this latest film.

When we re-meet Channing Tatum’s gentle hunk in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, he’s bartending at parties for the very rich in Miami. The gig could be worse, but though he doesn’t quite say it, the implication is that he’s even aged out of dancing now. He has to seriously think about it when his wealthy employer offers him $6,000 for a dance later that evening.

Asking why sequels exist doesn’t usually produce satisfying answers, but Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a film that was born backwards, a fit of inspiration from Steven Soderbergh after seeing what Tatum had done with Magic Mike Live. The Las Vegas stage show, inspired by the first two movies, is described on its website as “an unforgettably fun night of sizzling, 360-degree entertainment”, “the great time you’ve been looking for” and “the ultimate girl’s night out.”

But Magic Mike’s Last Dance is not quite any of those things. This film is that thing that many sequels promise, but don’t deliver on: It’s both a true evolution and a conclusion. It’s also part fantasy, part bleak reality, part commentary the fundamental value of dance and what’s lost in a society that has forgotten how.

In Last Dance, Soderbergh gives Mike a wealthy benefactor, in the form of the operatically named Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek) who is in the midst of a messy divorce from an obscenely successful media mogul and looking to shake things up.

After an acrobatic, but fully clothed, encounter with Mike, she decides to whisk him away to London, dress him up and put him in charge of staging a show that promises to make its audiences feel the way she did the night she met Mike. In the process, she, and Soderbergh, Tatum and screenwriter Reid Carolin, set a historic London theatre, and all of its fussy rules, ablaze (figuratively).

It’s a clever conceit for a filmmaker who never tires of singeing the establishment he continues work to in. And like many Soderbergh films, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, shaggy, earnest and innocently tawdry, goes down so easy that it’s almost impossible to appreciate it fully on a first watch.

If there is a quibble, it’s that Hayek and Tatum don’t quite inspire the will-they-won’t-they tension that the movie seems to be asking of them. They work well together when they’re working together, but the romantic chemistry is a bit lacking.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a Warner Bros. release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “sexual material and language”.