Magic Mike XXL Is Sex and the City 2 With Waxed Pecs
Photo: Everett Collection
There often comes a moment in every winning entertainment brand when it becomes woefully over concerned with its own original points of delight and starts driving home a theme too hard–at the expense of characters and story.Seinfeld, remarkably, managed to put off this moment until its very last episode, a thunking meta-riff on just how irredeemably selfish and unlikable the characters were. Sex and the City started veering this way shortly after 9/11, when the glamor of Blahniks, Louboutins and the sparkly city itself–which once were mere charming backdrops to cunning parables about love, sex and friendship–became the true stars of the show. This meta-ness reached its vacuous zenith, of course, in SATC2, when the show’s fetish with empty luxury found its natural end-point in Abu Dhabi, perhaps the world capital of bling worship.
Photo: Everett Collection
As for the relatively new Magic Mike franchise, alas, it’s hit that point on the early side with Magic Mike XXL, which opens today. If you happened to see the original 2012 hit, in which the hopelessly sweet and affable beefcake Channing Tatum played a successful male stripper in Tampa, Florida, who yearns for more from his life, you may remember how Steven Soderbergh managed to direct that flick with a combination of the muted realism he used in Sex, Lies and Videotape and Traffic and the populist streak of everyday working-class American hustle he brought to Erin Brockovich.
The result was a genuinely moving film about the ambitions and anxieties of a bunch of guys who just happened to stage satisfyingly raunchy strip acts for the ladies every night. As we watched Tatum’s Mike grow increasingly dissatisfied with the cheap ego boost and access to endless women afforded by his job (and his bod), we watched his ingenue protégé, The Kid, become enamored of that lifestyle. Kind of like All About Eve for the trashy tanned-and-depilated Florida bro crowd, it was a sex- and drug-driven morality tale about how narcissism can block people from true happiness. And from beginning to end, it was packed with hot men gyrating in their dollar-stuffed G-strings before crowds of women having a great time.
Photo: Everett Collection
Sadly, Magic Mike XXL, directed by longtime Soderbergh colleague Gregory Jacobs, lacks so much of what made its predecessor work–not least of all Matthew McConaughey, whose wild-eyed aging-stripper impresario imbued the first film with a seedy, sad gusto. (His ornery ringmaster role has been quasi-replaced in the sequel by the hulking Joe Manganiello.) The movie also lacks a plot–any plot whatsoever. It’s a meandering, stakes-free road trip in which Mike, now with his own custom-furniture business but itchy to dance again, gets back with his stripper bros and hits the highway for a male-stripper expo in Myrtle Beach, with the expected steamy stops along the way. And, weirdest of all, it lacks the abundance of tacky but sexy strip numbers that powered the first film. Virtually an hour passes before the guys dance at all. There’s one truly delightful scene, in which the muscle bros dare Manganiello to strip in front of an impassive minimart cashier to get a smile out her. But there’s little dancing after that until the finale–and even that’s constantly being interrupted by silly proclamations from Jada Pinkett-Smith, who plays a fearsome former flame of Mike’s who’s now running some kind of high-end male-stripper brothel catering mainly to African-American women in Savannah. That scene is very Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil meets How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
But other scenes that are supposed to capture the gonzo rhythms of stripper bros shooting the shit on a road trip are simply leaden, airless, unfunny. Mike’s romance in this film, with Amber Heard as a pole-dancer who wants to be a photographer, is even less fleshed out than in the first one, where the duo at least had a mutual love of breakfast food to talk about. But the most annoying thing about XXL is that it has taken a powerful implicit theme from the first one–the pleasure the strippers give to women–and beat it into the ground here. Every other line is about how male stripping is actually an exalted calling to give otherwise sexually unfulfilled women the fantasy of getting exactly what they want, of being a queen in the eyes and arms of one perfect man. “We’re like healers or something,” one of the strippers actually says at one point. Ugh.
Photo: Everett Collection
The theme goes into overdrive when, for tenuous reasons, the stripper bros visit the Charleston mansion of Andie MacDowell and her (of course, sexually bored) middle-age lady friends. The stripper bros tell the ladies how beautiful and special they are, even serenading them with Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” and of course the ladies swoon and giggle. By this point it couldn’t be any more apparent that the film is merely pandering to its presumed audience rather than trying to tell a real story. Even more cringingly, it does the same with its presumed gay fans in a scene where the stripper bros drop by a Jacksonville gay bar named Mad Mary’s and get up onstage to vogue, egged on by a fat drag queen that later joins them for drinks on a moonlit beach. Here we also learn Mike’s (awful) drag name: Clitoria Labia. A real drag queen could come up with a better name than that even if she were stuck in a K-hole.
But hey, perhaps this quickly devolving franchise is on to something: When I saw it, I was (embarrassingly) the only guy in a theater full of women, many of whom howled through it. At least, at the conclusion of this thoroughly plotless celebration of a woman’s right to pay a he-man in a shiny thong to sit on her face in public, they all had the good sense to laugh aloud at the inanity they’d just witnessed before filing out of the theater.
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