It’s no mystery why the Magic Mike franchise appeals to women, and it should have little problem enticing them back to theaters for the third and final installment in the series, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, this weekend. What many may not realize, however, is that director Steven Soderbergh and star Channing Tatum’s trilogy isn’t just a ribald sexual romp tailor-made to raise the temperatures of female moviegoers.
No, its allure is far greater than that. Because Magic Mike is—let it be heard from club to shining strip club!—also for the guys, the dudes, and the bros.
When it debuted in 2012, Soderbergh’s original Magic Mike appeared to be merely a raunchy dramedy— based in part on its headliner’s early days as an exotic dancer—about a group of male strippers taking it all off to the delight of hooting-and-hollering ladies in Tampa, Florida. As it turns out, it is about that, but it’s also considerably more: a funny and engaging story about a guy, Mike (Tatum), using his magnetic charisma and sultry moves to both indulge his hedonistic urges and to achieve his dream of becoming a custom furniture maker.
Along the way, he falls for a girl (Cody Horn’s Brooke) and contends with the push-pull between who he is, what he does for a living, and where he wants to go—struggles that are as relatable as he is, and transform the film into a universal saga about work and identity.
With style and humor to burn—much of it thanks to Matthew McConaughey as Dallas, the Xquisite club proprietor who serves as Mike’s mentor and partner—Magic Mike is a character study of a man figuring out which direction to head. Its 2015 sequel Magic Mike XXL, meanwhile, is a bawdy road trip comedy that stuffs Mike and his buddies (played by Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Adam Rodriguez, and Kevin Nash) into a food truck headed to a stripper convention for one last big-ticket hurrah.
Operating at a boisterous pitch, and thriving on the energy of its hetero bromances, it’s an episodic boys-will-be-boys adventure—fixated on its characters mending fences and banding together on a titanic mission—that’s marked by ripped torsos, steamy seductions and show-stopping numbers that are as impressive as they are hot. It’s arguably the most gleefully testosterone-y film of the past decade.
Despite the fact that their stripping centerpieces are designed to turn women on, both Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL are fundamentally about men. Their stories are told expressly from their perspectives and concern their ups and downs, and they function as fantasies about being superhumanly desirable to the opposite sex. Moreover, on a basic level, they’re consistently charming and amusing, led by Tatum’s understated performance as a male entertainer with a heart of gold (and an ambition to be more than merely a sexual object), and bolstered by an ensemble that enhances the material’s spirit of himbo camaraderie and working-class struggle.
That Soderbergh also shoots the hell out of them—drenching them in enveloping colors and staging them for maximum eroticized impact—only further casts them as odysseys about the types of drinking-partying-screwing macho studs that women want to be with, and men want to be.
Whereas its predecessors tapped into a strain of exuberant bacchanalian virility—and a yearning to make it endure for as long as possible—Magic Mike’s Last Dance is a more romantic and melancholy trilogy capper, charting Mike’s time in London with Salma Hayek’s recent divorcée, who hires him to put on a lavish theatrical stripping show. Its muted and sweet nature is a significant departure from Mike’s earlier exploits, proving to be a fable about a pushing-forty playboy learning to grow up, both personally and professionally, without losing sight of his fundamental self.
That makes it an intensely relevant tale for any man over the age of twenty, suggesting that uninhibited juvenilia can be retrofitted into something mature, meaningful and lasting. Plus, it imagines a happily-ever-after in which Mike finds true love and artistic fulfillment with an immensely wealthy Salma Hayek—a plot point that makes it akin to the ultimate male fairy tale.
Consequently, don’t be fooled by the cowboy, fireman and police-officer costumes, the gyrating, hip-shaking moves, or the screaming-with-delight women—the Magic Mike movies are for every guy who’s ever wanted to hang out with their friends, felt unsatisfied at a job, been unlucky in love, or sought to rock a woman’s world. Embrace them, dudebros!
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