Magic Mike XXL Puts on a Big Show

Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a tease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us into his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the sober ones, at least — sized them up as worthless, pressing them to put on pants and get real jobs.

Its sequel, Magic Mike XXL, begins with its own fakeout. Mike (Channing Tatum) has managed to quit the business, buy an engagement ring for his girl and launch a business designing rustic headboards for Tampa bohemians. But Mike’s dreams haven’t worked out. And then lumbering beast Tarzan (Kevin Nash) phones to tell Mike that their snake-hipped former boss, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), is dead.
He means dead to him — Dallas ditched the club for the casino gold rush of Macau — but XXL lets the misunderstanding linger for long, glum minutes as we groan that we’ve been tricked, again, into attending a wake. Then it cracks a beer and toasts the boys’ freedom. What a relief, for both us and the gang: Tarzan, pretty boy Ken (Matt Bomer), loudmouth Tito (Adam Rodriguez), towering Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello), and their joker DJ Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias). Dallas picked their outfits, choreographed their routines, and didn’t give a damn if, say, his hot fireman was fire-phobic. So now what?

If Soderbergh was slapping us voyeurs on the wrists, this sequel couldn’t be more delighted to put on a show. It’s a practically plotless party. Director Gregory Jacobs, Soderbergh’s longtime assistant director, working, presumably, with his benediction, doesn’t see his studs as callow grifters. Says new kid Donald Glover, “We’re like healers.” In that analogy, women are the patients, and the boys’ caravan to a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach is Doctors Without Borders. At pit stops, the fellows disembark to delight the opposite sex (or, in one case, a bar of gay men unamused by their drag antics). Sometimes they dance for free, and once or twice, they even let the ladies speak, as when they wander into a den of middle-aged Southern belles drunk on the fine wines flowing from their aristocratic, gorgeous hostess Andie MacDowell. There’s also a bemused-temptress part for Amber Heard, who appears out of the dark on a midnight beach, all backlit blond hair, cigarette smoke and attitude. Mostly, however, the women they meet are wordless, screaming fans or an attentive audience simply giggling at their bro jokes, which is hard to grouse about when the women in the theater — myself included — were doing the same.

There’s a sense that the genders have inverted, an idea that Jacobs and screenwriter Reid Carolin put on the screen but barely explore. The dudes dance because they’re desperate for money, yet every woman in their world is flush with cash.

As for the men, they’ve been directed to ape Marilyn Monroe. They aren’t sexy with a grown man’s confidence, the way George Clooney can look at a woman like he’s picturing her without clothes. Instead, they’re daffy and insecure, almost innocent. XXL is a topless, sticky-wet movie where almost no one is having sex. The boys aren’t even grown up enough to say the word, instead asking, “Did you bangy?” They’re into the game for validation — can they make women swoon? — which boils over in a riotous scene where Manganiello, an exaggeration of male romance-novel beauty, nervously lampoons his own attractiveness in a Quik-E-Mart, pouring bottled water and Cheetos on his chest. Monroe on that subway grate would give him a thumbs-up.

Only when a mature woman — Jada Pinkett Smith playing a frosty madam — saunters into the frame does sex become erotic. She challenges Mike to impress her, and for a minute you’re not sure he can. Tatum’s face is as transparent as a windowpane. He stays slackjawed until an idea blurts directly from his brain to his mouth. What’s brilliant about his acting style is that his characters feel raw and real, even as his body flips into contortions he must have practiced for weeks. Like the best dancers, he makes his movements feel improvised even when they’re not — and we can tell by the way Jacobs wisely circles around, filming long, planned takes of Tatum bouncing all over the set doing handstands, leaping across chairs and spanking women with his own shirt. He’s selling nonsense fantasy in a movie that’s nonsense fantasy, but, boy, is Tatum the real deal.