Magic Mike's Last Dance

The third Magic Mike movie is silly, sexy, and all about supply and demand.

Part of the appeal is simply that he’s trying to do it. Even as Soderbergh, Carolin, and Tatum explore a system of want that is arguably illogical and likely impossible, it is respectful to that system. [Magic Mike XXL](https://www.vox.com/2015/6/30/8870077/magic-mike-xxl-review) (a stroke of titular genius), in which “female desire” comes to the fore, and explodes a bit, definitionally. Like a dancer, the movie knows that once those elements are lost, they’re harder to regain than they were to gain in the first place. What the Magic Mike movies have only leaned further and further into is that it can also be uniquely fun. The movies have always understood that in this system, demand — desire — is actually the hard part. There’s not just the trick of creating desire, there’s the undertaking of maintaining it. Mike has lost his furniture business to the pandemic, he owes money to his friends, and Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault, playing a ridiculous role with a lot of fun, pathos, and magenta) is paying him an absurd amount of money to put on a show. This flouts the script of the show-within-the-show of Last Dance, which very explicitly posits that one of the primary things a woman might want is “not just one man.” “Lots of guys” is a bedrock premise, employed by teen magazines, [first Magic Mike movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4eqIV-XMnA) is “about the economy, actually.” This was maybe the first thing the series really understood about female desire, the eventual subject of its trilogy, which concludes with [Magic Mike’s Last Dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIGdw-BRxw). The gang, now more explicitly styled as a fun team of buddies, embarks on a road trip of multi-demographic proportions, bringing joy to hooting and hollering groups of older white women, Black women, and queer people — which is to say that “female desire” is best understood as a useful shorthand for something perhaps even more complicated and interesting, without pausing to get into the ins and outs of gender. The Magic Mike trilogy is about the economics of female desire, actually.

“Magic” Mike Lane can't stop bumping and grinding. He's the male stripper version of a bank robber or cowboy who swears he's retired but gets lured back ...

But it’s a movie about moviemaking, the artistic process, and all the various types of cinema and fiction it’s drawing on, as much as it’s about Mike and Max and the dance production. It all leads to the big show (another kind of movie-format cliche), and when the curtain finally goes up—revealing a cabaret-ish production that’s essentially the same one Tatum co-created that’s currently a smash in London, complete with audience participation—the movie cleverly finds ways to connect what’s happening onstage to what’s happening within Mike and Max. None of it would work if Tatum weren’t every inch the movie star, and probably the last American-born A-list movie actor who can really, truly dance and gets occasional opportunities to prove it. He has retained a smidge of “I can’t believe this is happening to me” energy, and he taps into it whenever he plays Mike, perhaps more so in this one. That’s where he meets Max ( [Salma Hayek](/cast-and-crew/salma-hayek) Pinault), the estranged and wants-to-be-divorced wife of a London one-percenter. [Steven Soderbergh](/cast-and-crew/steven-soderbergh)’s new movie gets the “I’m done, don’t ask me to dance” ritual out of the way in less than ten minutes.

Almost eight years after the last Magic Mike film arrived in cinemas, Channing Tatum is reprising his role as exotic dancer Mike Lane for one more film ...

What else has Alan Cox been in? Who is Edna? What else has Juliette Motamed been in? Who is Maxandra? What else has Channing Tatum been in? Who is Mike?