Mike still has his magic

There are some movies about adult entertainers that try miserably to wrap a story around them and do a miserable job of it. Showgirls is probably the best example of this. It’s also the worst movie ever. Even though it’s about strippers, it isn’t sexy or fun or enjoyable in any way. Don’t watch it unless you want to have a benchmark to determine incrementally how much better other movies are in comparison.

Magic Mike, interestingly, was a very good movie about male exotic dancers. It had a story. It was deftly made, which was no surprise since it was a Steven Soderbergh project. It was also fun to watch.

There. I said it. I enjoyed watching it, and would probably watch it again if given the chance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Magic Mike XXL, however, tried to follow through as a sequel by doing a very poor job of wrapping a story around some extended sequences of Mike (Channing Tatum) and his male exotic entertainer cohorts on stage doing their thing. Granted, there’s a lot of athleticism and artistry that must go into their performances.

I bet, however, that the hundreds of women and maybe three other guys that I shared the theatre with probably didn’t want to have to sit through the exhaustive bromance road trip that occupied the other 90 minutes of the movie when the fellas weren’t gyrating.

When we last left our hero in Tampa, Mike had just left the business to pursue his dream of being an entrepreneur, despite having just lost a lot of money and being otherwise unable to secure a bank loan.

When we pick back up with him in XXL, Mike has moved on and moved away. His furniture business is booming but you can never really escape your past, can you? His former stage partners Tarzan (Kevin Nash), Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), Ken (Matt Bomer) and Dick (Joe Manganiello) entice him to join them on a journey (in a frozen yogurt food truck, no less) to a strippers’ convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C. This is their last big hurrah and they’re going to go out with the best show of their careers.

As stories go, it’s threadbare.

I say this: it’s a really good thing that Tatum had a lot of personal experience with this form of entertainment from his pre-Hollywood life. It’s the only believable part of his acting. When Mike is working at his furniture business, it looks like he is picking up a tape measure, a level and a hammer for the very first time.

There’s a reason that some professionals choose method acting as their career philosophy: it does so much to provide authenticity.

Certainly, most of my fellow theatre-goers did not want to watch five guys in a van talking about their hopes and dreams while resolving their relationship issues. The first 45 minutes of this uneven mess is a very slow, chatty time. Thankfully, there are a few scenes that provide mere moments of levity. Perhaps the best scene (outside of a van or a nightclub) is at a convenience store, takes about two minutes, and contains only seven words of dialogue.

Otherwise, however, Magic Mike XXL exists for only one reason and it’s the same reason why anyone goes to a strip club. In the annals of film history, this one rates somewhere between its predecessor and Showgirls. It seems to take far too long to build up steam, but everything leads up to the grand finale, which doesn’t disappoint in terms of theatrics and acrobatics.

Perhaps the movie should have just been two hours of different performances at this convention. That would have saved everybody the time, the trouble, and the façade that a movie about strippers needed to have a story.