Short Take |
“Magic Mike XXL” — Go for the fun, walk out thinking about your place in the dance
By
Published: Jul 08, 2015
If you skipped “Magic Mike” because you thought it was about men who thrill women by humping the air in thongs, you missed a seriously good movie. Its real subject was late-stage capitalism: Mike (Channing Tatum) wants to design furniture, but the economy only wants him to strut his stuff for sexually unfulfilled women. “Magic Mike XXL,” just out, deals with that economy three years later. Mike and his dancer friends are struggling — Mike makes furniture, but he can’t afford to pay for his assistant’s health plan — so they see a stripper convention in South Carolina as their “last ride,” a final burst of creative dancing before they surrender to reality. The movie is light-hearted and generous — these men are uncommonly attentive to plus-sized women — and there’s so much dancing you could think it’s a romp. That’s the surface. But name another movie about “adult” entertainers in which one of them (Matt Bomer) says he’s a “Level Three Reiki healer” and then credibly passes his hands over an injured friend because he is, in fact, a Reiki practitioner. Then there’s the message of the film, which is that dreams have a sell-by date and our lives are much tougher than we anticipated. And then there’s the final close-up of Tatum, who understands that his moment of triumph is evanescent and bittersweet — a portrait of where we find ourselves in this summer of 2015.
