Magic Mike's Last Dance: Movie Review

Cast: Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault,
Director: Steven Soderbergh

Magic Mike is back again for one last dance.

However, depressingly, this threequel is entirely flaccid and utterly lacking in any kind of sizzle - both intellectually and physically.

Even if director and writer Steven Soderbergh deserves praise for building a world that made a one-dimensional character of a stripper into a fully formed human being, this riff on Pretty Woman seems to be bereft of anything other than a lead in to an extended dance sequence finale that feels tame by comparison to its past.

Down on his luck after the pandemic ripped the heart out of his furniture business, Tatum's Mike Lane is bartending. Chancing upon potential divorcee Max Mendoza (Hayek Pinault) at a charity event, Mike's pulled back into the world he once inhabited after he's offered thousands to dance one last time for her.

After a sultry display of his former talents, the next morning Mike is whisked to London by Max to help her deal with her estranged husband and re-engage a theatre Max has become the owner of. Deciding upon a show for female empowerment, Max enlists Mike to do the business...

Dealing more with choreography than outright titillation, Magic Mike's Last Dance is more concerned with mashing up the Magic Mike live show and the Magic Mike talent search than any kind of real coherence or plot.

Tatum has obvious charm as the stripper with a heart of gold, but he lacks the chemistry with Hayek Pinault's feisty Max who seems to be a mouthpiece for feminism but who baulks at letting her young daughter enjoy it.

With a voiceover from Max's daughter that aims to dabble philosophy with the ethics of dancing and its history, Soderbergh tries to coat the whole affair with intellectualising, but ends up sucking the life out of proceedings and rendering it all a somewhat of a theory lesson than a movie outing. It's a dissertation more than a dance off, and even the haughty weariness of Max's butler can't save proceedings from collapsing into a slump as the film wears on.

Feeling like some kind of muted Full Monty, Magic Mike's Last Dance won't offer what the audience expects - and while the word "Last" is in the title, it's highly unlikely Tatum's done with this. 

At one point in the film Tatum's Mike skirts across the stage in a pair of soled shoes. The irony is that in the entire movie, these are the only moments of soul that emerge from this utterly disengaged and woefully inadequate movie.