See Mike. See Mike dance.
No, no! Mike does not dance anymore. He tends bar.
See Mike pour. See Mike pour more.
Mike is at a charity event. Mike is tending bar for a rich lady named Maxandra. Her friends call her Max. Everyone calls her Max. Maxandra is hard to pronounce for some people. Especially when some people spend time at Mike’s bar.
Max is going through a divorce. Poor Max! Max feels like she needs a distraction.
Max pays $6,000 to pay Mike to dance for her. Mike could use $6,000. Mike dances. Mike does more than dance. Mike sleeps in Max’s bed. Max is in the bed, too. Tsk, tsk, Mike and Max!
Mike and Max wake up together. Max wants to spend more time with Mike. But no more sharing beds! No, no. Max wants Mike to come to London with her. Max says it’s strictly business. Max will pay Mike $60,000 for a month of Mike’s time. Mike says, with that kind of money, Mike will do whatever Max wants.
No, no Mike! Max says it’s just business. Max wants Mike to help Max get back at her lying, cheating, estranged husband. Bad, estranged husband! Bad!
Max has a plan. Max’s estranged husband has given her a London theater. The play there is making money. But Max doesn’t want money. Max wants revenge. Max wants to shut down the play and produce a male strip show instead.
Max wants Mike to direct the strip show. Mike has experience with strip shows. Mike has lots of experience with strip shows. Two other movies’ worth, at least.
Mike does not dance anymore. Well, Mike does dance, but only for $6,000. Now Mike will bring in other dancers and teach them how to dance with very few clothes on.
Max will be happy. Max will get revenge. Mike will be happy. Mike will get $60,000.
The Plugged In reviewer will not be happy. He will not be happy at all.
Poor Plugged In reviewer!
There’s an odd and perhaps unexpected nod to the beauty of monogamy in Magic Mike’s Last Dance: During a strip show, the MC says that sometimes, “the greatest fantasy of all is knowing
The movie wants to suggest that dancing male strippers offer more than just skin and simulated sex—something I don’t buy. But the idea of making those around us feel valued and special is an important one—and one that we can do just as effectively with our clothes on.
As mentioned, there’s a charity attached to Max’s in-limbo fortune, and it’s nice to support worthwhile causes. But Max mentions that most of the people attending the charity function don’t know what the charity actually does—and since that’s the last we hear of it ourselves, perhaps Max doesn’t, either.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance contains some spliced-in narration at times, talking about the importance of dance itself. At one point, the narrator talks about how dance was part of an evolutionary process.
Mike talks with an old stripper compatriot via a Zoom-like meeting. The compatriot is a big believer in complicated horoscopes, and he says that Mike is in a particularly exciting time, astrologically speaking. “This is your dharma,” he tells Mike, using a Hindu term.
“Sex work is nothing to be embarrassed about, Mike!” another stripper friend tells our protagonist. And indeed, no one here blushes a bit.
Erotic dances are a big part of the plot here—and really, the reasons that this film exists at all. We see Mike and tons of other men dance and writhe about in various states of undress, With Mike himself stripping down to his boxer-brief skivvies. We don’t see any actual nudity, and the level of skin is actually throttled back from what we saw in the last film in the series, Magic Mike XXL. But the dances themselves can be extremely suggestive, amounting to stylized, simulated sex (recalling various positions and acts). Mike’s opening dance with Max is particularly erotic, with various body regions being grasped.
Mike also shares the stage with a female dancer. Again, the dance is outrageously suggestive, and both Mike and the female wind up in their revealing undergarments. (The woman wears just a small black bra and thong-style underwear.)
Another note before we move past the dance sequences: Max’s high-school-age daughter, Zadie, attends one of the strip shows with her mother. The family butler, Victor, shields her eyes during certain scenes and removes her completely from the auditorium for others, but still. Having her attend at all seems problematic.
As mentioned, an erotic dance ends with Mike and Max in bed together. Nothing critical is shown, but they cuddle together with their bare shoulders peeking above the sheets. We should note that Max paid $6,000 for the performance that led here. And when she offers Mike $60,000 to come with her to London, he immediately believes—and accepts—that she’s paying (at least in part) for sex. She insists their relationship from that point on is strictly business, but they do get progressively romantically entangled. They kiss, sometimes passionately.
We hear several double entendres. We learn that Max’s estranged husband had an affair with his assistant. A sculpture in Max’s house depicts a fully nude woman (sans arms, legs and head). Mike cautions stripper newbies that they have no idea how crazy soccer-mom-filled strip shows can be. “Prepare yourself for the zombie apocalypse of repressed desire.”
Victor jokingly offers to kill someone.
About 35 f-words and 20 s-words. We also hear plenty uses of “a–,” “h—,” “d–k” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’ name is misused four times (half of those with the word “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused once. We hear some crass references to testicles.
Mike begins Last Dance as a bartender, and we see him pour out several libations. When Max asks him to dance for her, he pours out what appears to be a whiskey and gives it to her, telling her to finish it before he begins his work.
When Max moves to kiss Mike in a car and Mike appears to draw back, she tells him that she’s just drunk. (Mike reminds her that she just had one glass of wine with dinner, but Max sticks to her story.) The two of them quaff champagne on a private plane. Characters drink elsewhere, too. Alcohol flows freely at a strip show.
Max and daughter Zadie have a frosty relationship for much of the movie. Max’s estranged husband manipulates politicians and bureaucrats to try to shut down Max’s show.
[Spoiler Warning] When Max tells Mike to shut down the show, Mike ignores her, even though she’s his boss. This seems like a fairly critical decision, given that if the show does go on as expected, Max will receive nothing from her wealthy husband, and her daughter will lose out, too. The movie praises Mike’s decision, as does Max (eventually). But given that this principled stand is based on whether a strip show goes on or not—the feel-good “moral” feels rather questionable and undercuts even the movie’s ostensible quasi-moral of female empowerment.
When it looks as though Mike’s and Max’s strip show will be done in by governmental bureaucracy, Max is angry and oddly mortified.
“Our show about empowering women is dead because I’m so [expletive] powerless!” she wails.
Empowering women? Yeah, sure. Tell yourself that.
Listen, I realize that I am not the target audience for Magic Mike’s Last Dance. And perhaps there will be those that insist that the Magic Mike movies are reactions to the way that women have been objectified—on stage and screen—for decades upon decades.
But I don’t think that objectifying men in a franchise about male strippers constitutes a step forward in the quest for a more respectful, decent culture.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance does its best to frame stripping and going to strip clubs as some sort of moral agency. Dance is natural, the movie says. It breaks down barriers, it says. Women can and should have anything they want, just like men can, it says.
To me, that sounds a little like a 10-year-old asking Mom to keep an alligator as a pet, arguing that it would teach him responsibility.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance does indeed have some talented dancers who showcase their abilities in lots of other forms of dance, from ballet to breakdancing. And Channing Tatum is still a likable, charismatic presence on screen.
But Magic Mike’s Last Dance isn’t fooling anyone with its pretentions. Few people will go to this movie to revel in the art of dance or to connect on a deeper level with humanity. They will go for the tawdry, cheap titillation of it all.
Instead of elevating women, it degrades both sexes. When it comes to this particular franchise, it’s about time that the music stopped.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
