Magic Mike’s Last Dance Review: Provides Some Interesting Reflections on The Importance Of Dance
Cast: Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Gavin Spokes, Caitlin Gerard, Christopher Bencomo
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a chapter of the Magic Mike franchise. After the extraordinary success of critics and audiences, Magic Mike’s Last Dance reunites the creative team of the first film: Channing Tatum reprises the role of Mike Lane, while Steven Soderbergh returns to direct the film, based on a screenplay by Reid Carolin, already the author of the first two chapters of the saga. The film is produced by Nick Wechsler, Gregory Jacobs, Tatum, Carolin and Piter Kiernan, while Julie M. Anderson is the executive producer. The choreography is by Alison Faulk and Luke Broadlick, both formerly of the Magic Mike franchise. In our review of Magic Mike’s Last Dance we will focus precisely on Steven Soderbergh’s intentions behind the camera, here grappling with a third episode that plays (like many of his previous films) with its tones and languages to different film genres. The result is a sometimes-confusing melting pot, uninspired but with interesting and generous ideas.
Magic Mikes Last Dance Review: The Story Plot
After a long hiatus and following a failed deal that left him broke and forced him to work as a bartender in Miami, it’s time for Mike Lane to get back to stripping on stage. Hoping to choreograph and perform in what he considers to be the last show of her career, Mike lures a wealthy woman in high places and follows her to London, accepting an offer he can’t afford to refuse. After a deal that has left him starved of cash and a long hiatus since his last act as a stripper, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) is forced to make a living working as a bartender for some wealthy clients in Miami, Florida.
The meeting with the rich Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek) will not only be the beginning of a sentimental and trusting relationship that he had never experienced before, but also an opportunity to leave the US borders and visit London, where Maxandra will propose a tempting job: take the reins of the old theater of the woman’s ex-husband, become theater director and choreographer and “rejuvenate” the public by including striptease numbers in the play. Magic Mike’s Last Dance marks the return behind the camera for Steven Soderbergh after having “abandoned” his film saga in 2013 with the first, lucky chapter. Taking over from Gregory Jacobs’ direction after Magic Mike XXL in 2015, Soderbergh stages a third (perhaps) conclusive episode that is somewhat surprising and unexpected. Even if a lot, in the writing phase, doesn’t add up, making it the least compact of the trilogy.
Again, it’s obvious how this will play out. This plot is barely standing, making it useless and superfluous. You go by the overwhelming physical attraction, but why are these two suddenly in love? When exactly did it happen? Besides, what’s the point of stuffing a failed plot into a film that at its core is a string of shirtless muscled men’s dances? The two levels collide, they deny each other. And let’s be clear: it’s not a moral judgment. Magic Mike’s Last Dance would have succeeded very well if he had abandoned himself to his nature, without having to justify it to us in any way, believing in it more. We are fans of total awareness, even for films that are considered frivolous. The result of this eagerness to hide and make oneself nobler (but also to please the target, and we all know what it is, the same as Fifty Shades, so to speak) is a very horny (unbearably) film but without a shred of charm or attractiveness Sin.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance Review and Analysis
The writing of the film, based on an original screenplay entrusted to Reid Carolin (he was already the author of the scripts for the first two chapters), however, has the unusual ambition of taking the character of Mike Lane and turning him into “other” than the expectations that the audience most fond of the series and Channing Tatum’s physical prowess could expect. Starting from the setting, Magic Mike’s Last Dance overturns the certainties of the target audience of the saga created by Soderbergh by shifting the relationships of his fictitious characters from sunny Florida to the austere London of the theatrical West End. An unprecedented inversion that Steven Soderbergh implements to focus attention on the evolution of the titular protagonist.
If the previous chapter by Gregory Jacobs could be easily assimilated into a feature film of the rise and fall of Mike Lane, The Last Dance picks up the pieces and the failure to pack a nostalgic, last show before the charming character played by Channing Tatum exits the stage and abandon the lights of the spotlights. This time, perhaps, once and for all. Despite the good intentions and the even good idea on paper to completely change the point of view of the story and part of the characters, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is tainted by writing that does not do justice to the interesting and colorful supporting actors who accompany Channing Tatum in the last act of his “magic” Mike’s cinematic journey; above all, a volcanic Salma Hayek in the role of the wealthy Maxandra Mendoza, a real female co-protagonist who not only manages to hold her own (and the audience’s attention) thanks to her stage presence, but who also gives Steven Soderbergh’s film its most intimate and genuine meaning.
Because despite a listless and at times improbable script, the film to be released on Thursday 9 February tries a different path compared to the one undertaken in the two chapters of the previous years; mixing the great tradition of English theater with the lysergic and sensual choreographies of the ensemble of strippers hired by Mike and Maxandra, the US director elevates the profession that had made the titular protagonist famous to total art and without borders, forever clearing stripping as low-key show to the detriment of a vision that is no longer classist but without borders. Precisely by combining striptease, heart-pounding choreography and sensual excitement with the démodé magic of the theater stage, Soderbergh impresses on the last dance of Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane an aura sympathetically comparable to that of Bob Fosse.
An absolute master of theater choreography and then film director of masterpieces such as Cabaret and All That Jazz, he seems to come back to life in the role of the renewed Mike, here grappling with a path of personal and professional rebirth as an unprecedented avant-garde theater director. Steven Soderbergh staged a risky juxtaposition, the icing on the cake of a sequel which, compared to the two that preceded it, loses its narrative strength, writing quality, and psychological digging but returns once again in a questionable way all the verve of the great cinematographic experimenter of the director, never shying away from the challenges of format, language and tone to give to his next celluloid creature.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance Review: The Last words
Magic Mike’s Last Dance would have succeeded very well if he had abandoned himself to his nature, without having to justify it in any way. We are fans of total awareness, even for films that are considered frivolous. The result of this desire to hide and make yourself nobler is a very horny film but without an iota of charm or appeal. The third chapter of the series with Channing Tatum returns to the hands of Steven Soderbergh and seems to close a path, that of its protagonist, in the most unexpected way possible. Despite a writing that borders on the improbable, Magic Mike’s Last Dance provides some interesting reflections on the importance of dance and the hierarchy of the arts today.
