Following its more modestly scaled predecessors but nonetheless ensconced in a like striptease-centered world, Magic Mike’s Last Dance offers a chance for Steven Soderbergh to not only wrap the trilogy he and Channing Tatum began releasing back in 2012, but an opportunity, too, to remark upon its stakes. Moving upward through class spheres and due northeast in terms of geographic terrain, Last Dance abandons the (now more politically fraught) space and texture of Floridian Americana for the gilded confines of the London theater scene’s upper echelons. Making its subject — the provision of charged fantasy for a presumed, more-real-than-imagined female audience — its own premise, this latest film takes a closer look at the dynamics of power, desire, romance, and escape inevitably in play.
Opening on the franchise’s onetime entrepreneur Mike Lane (Tatum) working freelance as a bartender after taking a COVID-era financial hit, he’s happened upon by one Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (a freewheeling, energetic Salma Hayek Pinault): a wealthy philanthropist in the midst of a divorce who understands his reputation as an erotic performer. After arranging for Mike to visit at her plush Florida home (one of many, we’re informed), she offers him thousands for a single night of intimate entertainment, which, in an evocative montage of dissolves between moments of their legibly total, mutual absorption, they seem to both get carried away — not only by his enduring prowess but through the blindsiding force of their own shared chemistry.
This unexpected turn is for Max a welcome distraction but still requires a certain accounting-for, prompting her to both retaliate and escalate the situation in her own way: by enlisting Mike’s services (to be illuminated later) for a hefty sum, carrying him back with her to London for a month. Reflecting and remarking upon the power dynamics of patronage extant both within the franchise and sex work generally (Mike hardly has the power here to say no), it also upsets the franchise’s prior dynamics of relative female passivity amid each film’s tactile erotic acts. Accounting for such old tropes of women as “receptive partners” (a bit understandably, as they’re paying to be “serviced,” whether privately or before a crowd), the latest film’s reallocation of narrative agency presents a welcome boon to the film’s female characters, who in previous films had little do do but offer witticisms or sit immobile, awaiting worship, in chairs onstage. This is of course its own sort of fantasy — one of being sensually embraced and taken care of by an embodiment of a certain corporeal ideal — but it’s hardly the only one to be had.
Mike’s new gig, it turns out, is likewise a blend of new and old: a more-than-invitation to bring his talents — or those of men with something like them — to the London stage. As part of a turf war with her outgoing husband, Max takes control of the velvet-festooned Ratigan Theater as a kind of pet project, installing Mike as its new head. Displacing its old director in the process, she aims to generate a subversive revision of an old gilded-cage costume drama, the enterprise providing a kind of mirror to her own comfortable but largely inert life and the dynamics of repression the film claims to address more broadly.
From there, the film is constructed largely with the staging of the show: in other words, with the construction of a fantasy. Casting, choreography, creative spats, and administrative snags provide friction over Mike’s month abroad, amidst a backdrop reliably framed as Old World in a kind of shorthand — repressed and out of touch. Through these dynamics Soderbergh, Tatum, and series writer Reid Carolin treat the production as a way to comment upon their own work, interspersing creative and ethical discussions with a slew of montages, which sometimes gesture at better than capture the work of assembling an elaborate show.
Alluding strongly to a live show adapted from the franchise, the conceit allows for moments of self-critique and re-orientation beyond what Max as a figurehead invites just on her own. Moving toward welcome models of more involved participation from female performers (most notably Juliette Motamed, who performs as the show’s sly and charismatic star) while aiming not to undermine the series’ provision of a freely erotic fantasia aimed squarely at women, the show works to make explicit what old Hollywood musicals often had to treat obliquely. Melding sterling choreography with a playful, still rare, and quite unabashed sexual frankness, the ultimate production becomes the film’s best case for watching: a lengthy climax that’s vigorously emotional, charged, and more elegantly engaged in metacomment than the rest of what makes it up.
Soderbergh, acting as usual as his own editor and cinematographer, veers from the at times self-parodic, freely jocular work of prior installments, into something far more graceful with this newest installment. While, in the moments before the curtain rises on the film’s centerpiece show, one can often feel the gears turning behind the film’s script and production (a byproduct, possibly, of a COVID-era shoot), the film’s climax is fully neoclassical, evoking the director’s own old favorites. An avowed fan of Richard Lester (best known for A Hard Day’s Night and other Beatles collaborations) and Bob Fosse (Cabaret, All That Jazz), Last Dance embraces both their self-reflexivity and the swooning sense of romance, of visual and formal play, inherited from Gene Kelly, Vincente Minnelli, and other artistic forebears. Blowing other musicals of the past decade straight out of the water (La La Land, West Side Story meanwhile exempted), Last Dance’s peaks become, a bit unexpectedly, radiant spectacles of color, movement, and light: and ones generous, too, in their ethical orientation.
Even amidst the gleeful creation of an escapist — if still bodily and immediate — variety of entertainment, Soderbergh and co. keep one eye on the inescapable entwinement of life with even the most seemingly frivolous art. Inevitably, without getting too particular, their stage fantasia routes back onto the financial and positional realities which produced it, accounting for the deep fluidity of our relations to one another, to money, and to our work (be it creative or not). In one offhand moment, Mike’s old friend and stage buddy Ken (Matt Bomer) waves off his financial concerns over an old debt, saying that money moves “like water” in multiple directions, gesturing at its potential as an ever-present, inescapable, and yet still-elusive force. For its abundance of spectacle, sly technique, and various distractions, Last Dance never loses sight of the fact that money, power, and desire work in similarly ambiguous, hard-to-track ways, and seem to move in surprising cycles. It’s almost inevitable, then, that when release comes, it’s with a shower of dollar bills — but there’s never much sense it’s either final or, beyond that moment, enough.
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