Magic Mike’s Final Dance is on Max, so go watch its one good scene

In comparison with 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Final Dance, was a box-office whiff. The third Magic Mike film is meant as the ultimate installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a coronary heart of gold, a aspect enterprise in carpentry, and a totally explored philosophy about girls’s pleasure. However not like the earlier Magic Mike films, it by no means constructed a fandom or turned a middle of on-line dialogue.

Blame the eight-year hole between the final movie and this one. Blame the wrestle to get folks to observe films in theatrical launch. Or extra precisely, simply blame the limitless issues with the film itself. However for no matter cause, the movie barely made a ripple when it hit theaters in February 2023.

Magic Mike’s Final Dance is now streaming on Max, the platform it was initially made for. Like every movie hitting streaming, it now has a brand new probability at discovering an viewers. However the Max launch isn’t more likely to transfer the needle a lot, given what a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed challenge it’s. Frankly, there’s just one scene in Magic Mike’s Final Dance that’s actually value watching, at the very least for followers of the earlier films, and it comes early within the movie.

For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital renters), the sequence begins about eight minutes in, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is named to satisfy along with his employer of the second, a wealthy, bored lady named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry enterprise below, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering firm Maxandra hires for her newest fundraising gig. Depressed over her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from one among Mike’s exes that he does a “foolish dance” which may cheer her up. She’s prepared to supply him $6,000 for a personal present.

Picture: Warner Bros.

Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore — however lured by the cash and stung by the “foolish dance” description, he modifies his thoughts, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s home of potted vegetation and knickknacks, and provides her a solo efficiency that doesn’t even attempt to masquerade as something apart from extremely theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.

The scene is actually a “foolish dance,” but it surely’s the one a part of the film that basically feels just like the movies that preceded it — notably like Magic Mike XXL, with its prolonged lectures (a few of them in poetic kind, delivered by Donald Glover) about how fulfilling girls’s fantasies is a sacred artwork. Mike begins by pulling up his shirt and placing Maxandra’s hand on his abs as if they’d therapeutic powers. Then he climbs throughout her and her furnishings, treating her to a lap dance that features carrying her round along with his face buried in her crotch, doing pull-ups on her knickknack cabinets whereas she yanks his pants off, and crawling throughout a desk on all fours along with her below him, pushing her alongside the floor along with his groin.

It’s all faintly hilarious. For these able to shopping for into the fantasy it’s promoting, it’s additionally form of horny, if solely as a result of each of the performers have the bodily power and charm to tug off these sorts of strikes. And if nothing else, it’s a prerequisite for diving into the widely humorous interviews the actors have executed in regards to the expertise of filming it. Both approach, the scene is handled with the straight-faced, near-religious gravity the Magic Mike films have at all times dropped at sensual dance routines. The actors are mainly miming slow-motion, acrobatic intercourse, whereas maintaining their garments on and their faces solemn.

The remainder of the film is only a downhill run, beginning with the shot instantly after the dance sequence, the place it turns into clear that Mike and Maxandra adopted their mimed intercourse with precise intercourse. Which is ok, besides that from there, audiences are requested to imagine that Mike has fallen for Maxandra and can do something to remain in a relationship along with her, despite the fact that she’s unstable, manipulative, dishonest, abusive, and above all, written so shallowly and erratically that it’s onerous to see the attraction. Particularly since Mike himself appears extra like a prop than a presence for many of this film. The carpentry work that outlined him in Magic Mike is gone. The buddies who outlined him in Magic Mike XXL have been sidelined, aside from a quickie Zoom check-in to acknowledge they exist. His philosophizing about his position on the planet is over. All that defines him on this film is his romance with Maxandra — which, inexplicably, is framed and narrated in elaborately poetic, nonsensical language by Maxandra’s prickly teen daughter.

Picture: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Assortment

Extra considerably, the film was expressly constructed round selling the real-life Magic Mike Reside stage present, and it offers the principle characters fairly minimal and uninteresting arcs whereas it focuses on their efforts to provide an analogous strip efficiency. The film’s massive climax is a prolonged dance efficiency by a bunch of latest performers who principally don’t even get character names, not to mention personalities. (Honest discover: Different Polygon viewers favored it greater than I did. For those who’re fantastic with the dearth of stakes or specifics for that sequence, and simply need spectacle, staging, and a few muscular guys taking off their shirts, it begins simply earlier than the 88-minute mark.)

Tatum dances once more in that sequence, and the choreography is compelling — he and dance companion Kylie Shea, who additionally by no means will get a personality title, slide round throughout a moist stage collectively. However there’s no sense of stakes in any of it, aside from the query of whether or not Mike and Maxandra’s underdeveloped, disagreeable relationship will proceed, or they’ll cut up up after the present.

That’s the enjoyable of streaming, although — viewers can dip out and in at leisure, and deal with the enjoyable bits with out committing to the tedious ones. They’ll additionally store round for one thing extra gratifying to observe after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic routine is over. The unique Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL are additionally each on Max — and on Netflix, in addition to many digital rental platforms.