Review: Magic Mike's Last Dance let down by bad writing

2 stars

Nobody comes to a Magic Mike movie for the writing.

Which is a good thing, too, because there are many things about Magic Mike's Last Dance that could have been written a whole lot better.

Audiences were first introduced to Channing Tatum's Mike Lane - a talented stripper with a dream of making furniture - back in 2012. There wasn't a lot of plot in that movie, it was more of a character study, as Adam (Alex Pettyfer) is introduced to the world of male strip shows. Steven Soderbergh directed, and he's back for this final instalment.

Then Magic Mike XXL in 2015 took the crew, with Mike now retired from stripping, on a road trip. Slightly more plot, more dancing and a bigger cast.

Now, more than a decade on from his retirement, Mike is working as a bartender with a catering business, his furniture dreams having gone down the drain.

It's uninspiring work, but he's out of the stripping game for good. That is until the wealthy woman (Salma Hayek) who organised the charity event he's currently working on offers him $6000 for a lap dance to take her mind off her troubles.

Thus begins a very long - excessively long - scene of Mike giving Hayek's Max a transformative personal lap dance which spans her living room.

This is basically a five-or-so minute sex scene without the sex - until they wake up in bed the next morning.

Having had her magical experience with Mike, Max invites him to spend a month with her in London. She says she has a job for him - a job which is not sex work related - and at the end of the month she'll give him $60,000. Mike wants to pay back his former stripping buddies who invested in his furniture business - we see a few of them via a Zoom call - so he agrees.

The job turns out to be directing a strip show version of a staid play, where a woman has to choose between a rich man and a kind man.

That's where the film lets you in on what it wants to be its central conceit - why can't women have everything?

At one point Mike asks how they can call themselves a show about female empowerment if they don't have a leading woman (the play's actress had been let go at this point). This is perhaps something that should have been asked as the script was handed in.

Magic Mike's Last Dance is written by frequent Tatum collaborator Reid Carolin - a man. He is the only one with a writing credit on the movie. If there was a woman working on the script, perhaps some of the sad tropes of years gone by could have been retired.

For instance, works on the theatre where Mike's show is being held have been forced to cease due to a bureaucratic order. So the dancers stake out the woman - who is single and lives alone and dresses in brown, out-of-date clothes - whose job it is to approve these works, decide five minutes of Googling will reveal her true desires, and perform an impromptu, personalised dance on her bus. Granted, this dance is a very cool, well choreographed scene. But the takeaway is that this little bit of male attention makes the woman so happy that she approves every application that comes her way. Are we to infer that she was denying applications because she felt unwanted? Not a very feminist take.

This is why no one is going to Magic Mike's Last Dance for the writing.

People are going for the talented dancers taking some of their clothes off - and they should be pleased with that at least.

The dancing is good, the crew are very obviously talented. There's perhaps a lack of variety in the routines, but that can be forgiven.

While Tatum and Hayek's more intimate scenes are rather steamy, there's still not a great deal of chemistry there, and viewers may struggle to buy their love story.

Fans of the trilogy will be disappointed that Ginuwine's Pony is barely featured, and Tatum is not even dancing in that scene.

If you ignore the poor writing and the ridiculous and out-of-place narration by Max's teen daughter, and simply focus on the dancing, you'll have a good time.