TBD | Florida's best male stripper is enlisted to put on a show in stodgy London. Directed by Steven Soderbergh Starring Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault Review by Jon Kissel |
The let’s-put-on-a-show nature of the plot is a natural fit for Magic Mike, as it’s been tried and tested in Magic Mike XXL. The problem here is that none of the dancers emerge as characters, likely because they are dancers first and not actors. Mike tells them that he’s going to turn them into strippers, having to get comfortable in a room full of ravenous housewives, but none of that training makes it onto the screen. The work just happens in the space between scenes, and the only real speaking role in this part of the film is a dreadful performance from Juliette Motamed, an actor from Max’s theater who pulls focus and grates on the viewer. Instead, Max’s family life pushes the production and Mike himself to the side. The travails of a billionaire’s soon-to-be ex-wife are not what anyone comes to a Magic Mike film to see, and Soderbergh and series writer Reid Carolin find no interesting path into the character. She’s indecisive and unclear, stunningly late to feminist critiques of Victorian period pieces and stubbornly passive in defeat. On top of the generically sardonic portrayal of Max’s teen daughter Zadie (Jemelia George), saddled with banal narration about the evolutionary history of dance, how is it that a film franchise that’s become about a specific kind of female empowerment can have such boring female characters?
Soderbergh isn’t so blinkered that he forgets what audiences are here for, and he provides it in the film’s only good scene. Mike’s seduction of Max is an incredible piece of work from a director who’s no stranger to seduction scenes. The lighting that is a staple of a Soderbergh-shot film, dark but clearly visible and with a hint of glow effects, is well-suited for a grind session that uses the whole floor space. A decorative frame is tested for strength, and then Mike does a gymnastic stripper move off of it later. It’s undeniably sensual, and avoids the inevitable corniness of the kind of male stripping that the franchise envisions. Nothing like that is replicated in the rest of the film. Rehearsals are kept in the shadows so they’re saved for the big show, but since there’s no investment in any of the individual dancers, it has the emotional pull of a music video or a commercial. Sure, the dancing is athletic, but who cares? Even Mike’s return to the stage is ruined by a stunning oversight, where his ballerina partner Kylie Shea choreographs the same routine for the film that she worked on years earlier in a standout sequence from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. How does this happen?
One great scene does not a movie make. Since his return to filmmaking in 2017, Soderbergh has been reliably making some of the best films of any given year, from Logan Lucky and High Flying Bird to Kimi, but this is perhaps the worst entry in his long career. Mike Lane doesn’t see failure during the periods of his life that are on camera. The business dissolutions happen offscreen, but here, his biggest flop is front and center. C-