Magic Mike's Last Dance (15)

Magic" Mike Lane is working as a bartender after a business deal goes wrong, leaving him in dire financial straits. By chance, he serves drinks at a party to wealthy socialite Maxandra Mendoza. She offers him a generous business deal: to oversee a spectacular dance show at The Rattigan theatre in London that will empower female audiences to chase their dreams. The stakes are high as Mike heads to the UK with Maxandra to audition performers.

LondonNet Film Review

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Sex sells and for long stretches, it’s the only thing worth buying in the concluding chapter of director Steven Soderbergh’s pelvis-pounding trilogy loosely based on lead actor Channing Tatum’s experiences working as a male stripper in Tampa. Billed as The Final Tease, the third film in a series that has unabashedly promoted pleasure over plot can barely muster the energy to stitch together some of the steamiest dance sequences in the franchise with a coherent storyline or empathetic, well-rounded characters…

Tatum affirms why he was voted People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2012 after the release of the first Magic Mike, performing a private dance for co-star Salma Hayek Pinault that beautifully showcases the art of stripping while dangling from the fixtures of an impeccably designed London apartment. I fear a sharp rise in visits to A&E as audience members attempt to replicate his hypnotic bump and grind on a shelving unit and bring down the house in the most literal and painful fashion.

A narratively superfluous Zoom call with four members of the old guard – Ken (Matt Bomer), Richie (Joe Manganiello), Tarzan (Kevin Nash) and Tito (Adam Rodriguez) – is a bittersweet reminder of the salty humour and male camaraderie that are sorely lacking from the third hurrah. Two-dimensional female characters including a bureaucrat (Vicki Pepperdine) with the power to closes theatres for code violations and the lead actress of a stuffy period drama (Juliette Motamed) who becomes the body-pierced MC of Mike’s razzle dazzle strip show are bound with fluffy pink handcuffs to the flimsy plot.

When we meet “Magic” Mike Lane (Tatum) again, he is working as a bartender in Florida after a business deal goes wrong. At a charity fundraiser, he serves a drink to the hostess, wealthy socialite Maxandra Mendoza (Hayek Pinault), and she promptly whisks him away to London to stage a scantily clad dance show in The Rattigan theatre as an act of defiance to her media mogul soon-to-be-ex-husband Roger (Alan Cox). “This is not a strip show. We are bringing the tsunami to London,” she purrs. The deluge never materialises. Max’s chauffeur and manservant Victor (Ayub Khan Din) and precocious daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) struggle to justify their existence as Mike and Max oversee rehearsals for the big show, which effectively fills the pulse-quickening final 20 minutes.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is hopefully true to the words of the title, signalling a lacklustre end to a flesh-fest that has gradually stripped away the freewheeling fun. Tatum and Hayek Pinault look sensational together in a gender-swapped Pretty Woman premise but Reid Carolin’s script doesn’t sell us their love story or the preposterous obstacles standing in the way of Max’s one-night-only theatrical extravaganza. Let the curtain, shirts and trousers fall.

– Jo Planter