[one-star-rating]Chaning Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez, Jada Pinkett Smith, Amanda Heard, Andie McDowell, Elizabeth Banks[/one-star-rating]
An older male stripper named Tarzan (Nash) is about to go onstage with a new routine. He turns to his coworker and confesses, “I haven’t been this nervous since Desert Storm.”
So…
Magic Mike XXL, you suck, and not in a good way!
Yet, women and gay men will line up to see more skin. (Spoiler: there’s not as much as the first one.) They’ll forgive what should be slamming dance routines that peter out after thirty twitchy seconds. They’ll forget that this movie is supposed to be entertaining. Magic Mike XXL is flaccid on every level.
Ex-stripper Magic Mike (Tatum) lives in Tampa. He has been trying to make a go with his handmade furniture shop for three years. His old work buddies show up in a frozen yogurt truck (not kidding). They tell Mike they’ve been abandoned by their manager (McConaughey in the last movie, an actor who may have just recently learned how to smell a crap script). They convince Mike to go to a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach for a last hurrah.
Thus starts a flimsy, feeble trip across our southern states.
Let’s forget that all of these characters are fairly stupid – blabbering inanities, littering, and whoring it up. Let’s also overlook that none of their conflicts have a lick of tension. Let’s ignore that this entire trip will gain them nothing but some temporary spending money.
Instead, let’s look at their message that male stripping is about entertaining and honoring America’s underappreciated females. If you flipped that and made it about female strippers honoring males, the film would rightfully start a riot. Despite all the “women are queens” talk, stripping is about money. So is this moronic movie.
Maybe I’m expecting too much to have a story with male strippers, entertainment, and a modicum of intelligence. (Maybe this is why I’m still single.)
How lunk-headed is MMXXL? These men take Ecstasy in the middle of the day while surrounded by other supposedly straight strippers. I’m about as far from a drug expert as one can get, but even I know that heterosexual males would only take Molly at night and near some potential female mates. That’s okay, I guess, since this whole film has gay undertones – a random stereotype mincing in the background, men holding hands, and heterosexuals finding their drag names.
More stupidity: on one of their erratic stops, they find the world’s weirdest whorehouse (owned by Pinkett Smith). Women pay a membership fee, and then they shower dancers with dollar bills so they can get groped and gyrated on.
There’s also that unconventional convention, hosted by Banks. It’s like none we’ve ever seen. There’s no competition; yet it runs like the male stripper version of drum corps, raining money the whole time.
Nothing is funny so much as it is degrading. I had a permanent wince.
The dancing feels like it’s going to get good, and then it just loses its juice in choppy editing and blurry camera work.
The least this film could’ve been is sexy. It even fails there, because the overly choreographed, flailing scenes have no real erotic interplay. I happen to think intelligent is sexy, but this film doesn’t. The men are vainglorious hunks of Jersey-Shore-style meat, and the customers lose their sanity over whipped cream, glitter, and rip-away pants.
[rating-key]
In the first flick, Tatum (who used to strip in Tampa) and director Steven Soderberg at least succeeded in showing a bit of strippers’ real life. This director, Gregory Jacobs, has always been a better producer of Soderberg’s films. There was no way he was going to fix this impotent, juvenile script.
The final release – Magic Mike ZZZ – is fruitless and flabby, lugubrious and limp.
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