Film review: Is Magic Mike XXL stripped of fun?

The Kings of Tampa return to disrobe again. But instead of sexy, sinful adventures, you’re left feeling this sequel is an emperor with no clothes, writes critic Owen Gleiberman.

In Magic Mike XXL, there’s a charming scene in which stud-muffin-with-attitude Richie (Joe Manganiello), walks into a convenience store to see if he can coax a smile out of the terminally morose woman at the checkout counter. To the tune of the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way, he does a strip routine that’s unhinged even for him, spilling snack food onto the floor and slithering up against the freezer like a python in heat. In the end, he gets what he wanted: that big smile. And the audience gets a sentimental surge, realising that a guy like Richie just wants to make women feel good.

I wish that was the only scene like it in the movie. But Magic Mike XXL is stuffed with moments in which the Kings of Tampa, now on the road to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to attend a male-stripper convention, do everything in their power to treat the women they run into like neglected royalty. Sure, these guys take their clothes off for a living, but the film’s winking point – made over and over again – is that they’re really self-esteem boosters for hire, purveyors of entertainment so wholesomely uplifting that it barely has a glint of anything unseemly. They’re saintly therapists in leather jockstraps.

Back in 2012, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike was exactly the kind of crackerjack pop drama you wanted to see about male strippers. It was sleazy and breezy at the same time, and it gave the pumped-up, slyer-than-they-looked performers enough room to strut their stuff and show that they could act as well. The film never took itself too seriously, yet in its lighthearted way it told the truth about stripping. It showed you how these sullen beefcake gods revelled in the teasing power they had up on stage, but it also understood that there will always be something cheesy about selling your flesh.

Shedding more than clothes

Magic Mike caught the pleasures and perils of the male-strip-club demimonde with such brazen insider awareness that at first it seems a smart move for Magic Mike XXL to dispense with anything that could be confused with a moralistic attitude. We’re led to believe that Channing Tatum’s Mike has outgrown the glory of thrusting his life away for dollar bills stuffed into a thong. He now has his own custom-furniture business, though he’s still scraping for dollars; the film knows there’s a big difference between following your dream and actually figuring out how to make it pay. Mike won’t admit that he’s feeling a twinge of nostalgia for his days of easy money and easy women, but when he gets a call telling him that Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas has died (actually, he’s just gone off to start a stripping venture in Macao), that’s enough to prompt him to pay a reunion visit to his former buddies. Joining up with them for the convention is a way for Mike to get a taste of what he’s been missing without getting back in the game.

For a while, the actors are lively company. Tatum, a much bigger star now than when he made Magic Mike, carries himself like a glowering bull who just happens to be the quickest person in the room. He’s also a fantastic dancer: when Mike is alone in his workshop and puts his furniture tools aside to do a solitary routine, the sultry grace of his movements makes you think that this man may be more of an artist when he’s doing a strip number than when he’s building a cabinet. On the van ride, Mike is joined by old friends like Ken (Matt Bomer), the pretty boy who can sing as well as he gyrates; Tarzan (Kevin Nash), the hulking old lion who’s like a less-damaged Mickey Rourke; and Richie, who’s begun to wise up to the fact that, while his abs may still be awesome, his career has passed its peak.

But once Magic Mike XXL gathers these wisecracking hunks together, it never really figures out what to do with them. The director, Gregory Jacobs, is a long-time Soderbergh assistant director who has never helmed a feature before, and he stages endless rambling scenes in which the characters speak what sounds like semi-improvised dialogue. First they sit around a campfire, where Mike meets Zoe (Amber Heard), who’s presented a little too automatically as his soulmate. Then they visit a private strip club that caters exclusively to upscale African-American women, who are all referred to as “queens”. The club owner (Jada Pinkett Smith), who happens to be Mike’s old flame, infuses her lap-dance bacchanals with so much uplifting rhetoric that she’s like the Oprah Winfrey of feminine libido. Then the boys wind up at an impromptu drinking party of middle-aged Southern belles, where they trade flirtatious quips that leave everyone in the room aglow.

All very nice, but where’s the sin, the tawdry tension? Magic Mike XXL is the opposite of prudish, to the point that the film gives off such an upstanding, body-positive energy that there’s almost nothing at stake. All the male characters appear to have a good, solid perspective on where they’re at – doomed to bad jobs once they retire from the stage – and that makes you wish at least one of them couldn’t have been trapped in his delusions. The closest thing there is to a dramatic arc is this: can they throw away their clichéd sailor and fireman costumes and come up with bold new routines? The answer, of course, is yes, but when they finally perform at the stripper convention, it looked to this viewer like an off night at the MTV Video Music Awards. The title of Magic Mike XXL is supposed to be a joke, but the joke is on the movie, which already feels like one sequel too many.

★★☆☆☆

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