Magic Mike’s Last Dance is on Max, so go watch its one good scene

Compared to 2015’s Magic Mike, XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, It was an utter failure at the box office. The third Magic Mike movie is intended as the final installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a heart of gold, a side business in carpentry, and a thoroughly explored philosophy about women’s pleasure. The third Magic Mike movie, however, has never been a hit with fans or a focal point of online discussions.

The eight-year interval between films is to blame. The struggle to convince people to see movies on the big screen. You can also blame the film itself for the problems. For whatever reason, it is hard to say why the movie barely caused a stir when released in 2023.

Magic Mike’s Last DanceMax is streaming the original platform for which it was made. Now, like any streaming film, the movie has another chance of finding a wider audience. But the Max release isn’t likely to move the needle much, given what a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed project it is. Frankly, there’s only one scene in Magic Mike’s Last Dance that’s really worth watching, at least for fans of the previous movies, and it comes early in the film.

For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital renters), the sequence starts about eight minutes in, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is called to meet with his employer of the moment, a rich, bored woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry business under, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering company Maxandra hires for her latest fundraising gig. Depressed over her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from one of Mike’s exes that he does a “silly dance” that might cheer her up. She’s willing to offer him $6,000 for a private show.

Warner Bros.

Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore — but lured by the money and stung by the “silly dance” description, he changes his mind, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s house of potted plants and knickknacks, and gives her a solo performance that doesn’t even try to masquerade as anything other than highly theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.

The scene is in fact a “silly dance,” but it’s the one part of the movie that really feels like the films that preceded it — particularly like Magic Mike, XXL, with its lengthy lectures (some of them in poetic form, delivered by Donald Glover) about how fulfilling women’s fantasies is a sacred art. Mike starts by pulling up his shirt and putting Maxandra’s hand on his abs as if they had healing powers. Mike climbs up her furniture and onto her, performing a dance on top of her, including burying his face into her crotch while she pulls off his pants, pulling-ups in the knickknacks, and even crawling on his all fours across a surface on his belly, with Maxandra under him.

It’s all faintly hilarious. For those capable of buying into the fantasy it’s selling, it’s also kind of sexy, if only because both of the performers have the physical strength and grace to pull off these kinds of moves. And if nothing else, it’s a prerequisite for diving into the generally funny interviews the actors have done about the experience of filming it. The scene has the same straight-faced and almost religious gravity that the Magic Mike films have brought to sensual dancing routines. While keeping their clothing on, the actors mime slow-motion sex with acrobatics.

After the dancing sequence it’s clear Mike and Maxandra have followed up their mimed sexual encounters with real sex. Which is fine, except that from there, audiences are asked to believe that Mike has fallen for Maxandra and will do anything to stay in a relationship with her, even though she’s volatile, manipulative, dishonest, abusive, and above all, written so shallowly and erratically that it’s hard to see the appeal. Mike is a bit of a prop for the majority of this movie. His carpentry skills were what defined him. Magic MikeIt is over. He is gone. Magic Mike, XXLThe only thing that has been done to recognize their existence is a Zoom quick check-in. It’s over for his philosophizing on the role he plays in this world. All that defines him in this movie is his romance with Maxandra — which, inexplicably, is framed and narrated in elaborately poetic, nonsensical language by Maxandra’s prickly teen daughter.

Photo: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

The movie is also notable for its focus on promoting real-life situations. Magic Mike LiveThe main characters are given a very minimal storyline and the focus is on them trying to create a strip show. The movie’s big climax is a lengthy dance performance by a bunch of new performers who mostly don’t even get character names, let alone personalities. It was a good movie, but other Polygon readers liked it better than I did. If you’re fine with the lack of stakes or specifics for that sequence, and just want spectacle, staging, and some muscular guys taking off their shirts, it starts just before the 88-minute mark.)

Tatum dances again in that sequence, and the choreography is compelling — he and dance partner Kylie Shea, who also never gets a character name, slide around all over a wet stage together. But there’s no sense of stakes in any of it, apart from the question of whether Mike and Maxandra’s underdeveloped, unpleasant relationship will continue, or they’ll split up after the show.

That’s the fun of streaming, though — viewers can dip in and out at leisure, and focus on the fun bits without committing to the tedious ones. They can also shop around for something more enjoyable to watch after Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s $6,000 acrobatic routine is over. The original Magic MikeThe following are some examples of how to get started: Magic Mike, XXL are also both on Max — and on Netflix, as well as many digital rental platforms.