Magic Mike XXL Equates Men With Tenderness Rather Than Guns And Car Chases

Magic Mike was one of cinema’s great unexpected revelations of this decade, a male-stripper movie that turned out to be a Steven Soderbergh joint, an artful piece of auteurism whose script equated the hustle for dollar-bills with a commentary on late-period capitalism. It was one of those great Trojan Horse entertainments that camouflaged its subterfuge: it came bearing gifts of washboard abs and Channing Tatum’s ass, but actually delivered subversive high-art.

Magic Mike XXL, its three-years-on sequel, arrives with no such cinematic sleight-of-hand. Instead, it seeks to deliver what was promised the last time around. This isn’t a male-stripper movie about American society, but a male-stripper movie about male stripping. It’s a motion-picture about ‘adult’ entertainment, about pantomimes of sexual fulfilment, about male sexual potency and female desire.

Its set-up is familiar from sequels eternal: getting the gang back together for one last big hurrah. Since last we saw the cock-rockin’ Kings Of Tampa, Tatum has settled down to an unfulfilling life as small-business-owner and jilted fiancé; jolted from the furniture-lugging quotidian only when Spotify fatefully alights on Ginuwine’s Pony. Matthew McConaughey and Alex Pettyfer have left for bigger paycheques (both on screen and off!), and the rest (Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodríguez, Gabriel Iglesias) have kept at it to diminishing returns, hopes and time both slipping away.

"Here, the Male Entertainer tosses off those old, queer clichés — no more firemen, sailors, soldiers, gladiators, cowboys, cops — and, instead, becomes humanised, vulnerable, supplicant."

They’re still hustling: an early scene finds the fellows, around a campfire, swapping get-rich-quick schemes and pie-in-the-sky dreams. And, for two hours, they get the chance to live out a fantasy: as Magic Mike XXL sets them on a roadtrip, each episode of their odyssey culminating in sustained set-pieces built around the glorification of their form.

But writer Reid Carolin wants to explore the mutual fulfilment that can be found in the act: how this shared male/female fantasy can wed sexual appetite and with unexpected soulfulness; the Male Entertainer a shaman that shape-shifts to suit mood, circumstance, individual. Sometimes, their beneficent performances involve grinding in a thong, other times it’s more like self-help or therapy.

Here, the Male Entertainer tosses off those old, queer clichés — no more firemen, sailors, soldiers, gladiators, cowboys, cops — and, instead, becomes humanised, vulnerable, supplicant; the greatest fantasy they can give that they care, listen, empathise, worship. Eventually, Carolin settles on a flipped fairy-tale metaphor that, absurdly, seems here sentimental and sweet: like Prince Charming holding the glass slipper, Manganiello’s Big Dick Richie is looking for the woman who’s a perfect fit, both figuratively and, um, anatomically.

As the roadtrip rambles on, we meet a cast of new characters, and enter a host of intimate spaces. Jada Pinkett-Smith plays a boss from Tatum’s past, who now presides over a private club — a repurposed plantation house in Savannah, no less — in which black female clientele are treated like ‘queens’ by a host of hard-bodied hunks (whose ranks include both Donald Glover and Michael Strahan!). There’s Andie MacDowell as hospitable Southern Belle, whose sexual agency is a product of a deep ache, and provides the film with fire and frisson. And Amber Heard plays Tatum’s second-straight mumblecore-esque alt-girl love interest, a photographer who — of course — at first refuses to be seduced by his charms, only to soon find herself the still-point at the centre of Tatum’s on-stage sexual storm.

Eventually they arrive at the big Grand Final forever looming in the third act, a ‘stripping convention’ ruled over by Elizabeth Banks. There, on stage, our Kings rebrand themselves as Resurrection; birthed anew amidst a shower of dollar-bills, using the stage as platform to bare their souls. Director Gregory Jacobs, a longtime Soderbergh aide, seems just as interested in the Regular Janes throwing the money as the men bathed in it; his camera drifting, time and again, to the amused, embarrassed, enthralled looks on their faces, delighting in that meeting-point of awkwardness and awe.

"Its men may be muscle-bound hunks, but there’s no violence, no aggressiveness, no alpha-male posturing, no rivalry."

In keeping with the first film, Jacobs trends towards a kind of stylised vérité: XXL’s settings dreamy-realist, all sunlight-bleeding-into-lens and the suggestive terror of true-black darkness. He doesn’t have Soderbergh’s cinematic chops nor long-take discipline, but the film’s not far, photographically; Soderbergh still hard-at-work, pseudonymously, as both cinematographer and editor, a cameraman hired away from his work on The Knick to again gaze rhapsodic at male bodies.

Both the filmmaking and the storytelling are far more conventional than its predecessor, and much of Magic Mike’s unexpected magic is absent. But there’s still something fascinating, transgressive at play, here; not just in the way it navigates both male and female fantasy, but in its particular portrait of masculinity. Its men may be muscle-bound hunks, but there’s no violence, no aggressiveness, no alpha-male posturing, no rivalry.

Instead, it’s a picture of fraternal bonhomie, mutual support, and shared vulnerability. When Nash’s Tarzan laments that no endless parade of willing women can fill the void of love and family, it’s tender, genuine; and when Manganiello finally finds a ‘fit’ for his prodigious member, there’s no bro-tastic high-fives, but sweet sentiments and shared happiness. Maybe this picture of masculinity, too, is a fantasy that the film is peddling; there something a little too cute about that moment when Tatum, herein, claims his God is a She. But, after a century of cinema in which male virtue has been equated with fist-fights, hand-guns, and car-chases, there’s something subversive and genuinely moving about a film equating it with tenderness, empathy, and beauty.