Valentine’s Day is next Tuesday and if you’re planning a romantic evening out you will have to make do with a crowded restaurant. Because the only vaguely romantic movie in cinemas is this cash-grab threequel from director Steven Soderbergh and star turn Channing Tatum.
Sadly, the anticlimactic Magic Mike’s Last Dance feels more like an extended advert for London’s Magic Mike Live strip show than a worthy follow-up to its riotously entertaining predecessors.
We catch up with Tatum’s Mike in Miami, eight years after he hung up his thong to enter the artisanal furniture business.
The pandemic ended that dream (after Magic Mike XXL’s erotic workshop scene, my money was on a health and safety inspection) which is why the skint hunk is now serving drinks at a party for loaded Max (Salma Hayek Pinault).
But when the well-heeled host learns of Mike’s stripping past, she offers him cash for a final private dance.
The film’s first routine is sultry and spectacular, with Mike throwing Max around her Grand Designs house like a sex doll, and it ends in a night of passion.
Smitten Max then whisks Mike away to London for a barely comprehensible scheme that involves transforming a stuffy West End play into a strip show.
She owns a theatre and, somehow, a troupe of well-oiled hunks will empower women and enact some sort of revenge on her billionaire husband.
From here, the romance takes a back seat as Mike seeks to recruit breakdancers from tourist hotspots.
There wasn’t much of a plot in the last film either but it had laughs, likeable characters and that brilliant petrol station dance involving an insecure hunk and a family bag of Wotsits.
This film’s earnest 20-minute finale isn’t nearly cheesy enough.
- Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Cert 15, In cinemas now
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