Magic Mike XXL review: “The feel good movie of the summer”

Magic Mike XXL review: Feels like a lighter version of the first movie – dumbed down but pumped up to the max, which might make it the best comedy of the summer so far.

It’s a muggy Monday evening in a Leicester Square cinema and I’m sat three rows back in a recently refurbished Empire. Tonight’s screening is running late, unusually by around twenty minutes or so. Thinking something is technically wrong with the screening gear, we fear the worst, but a few moments later Channing Tatum enters the auditorium with a few buddies and a massive entourage, and the packed audience erupts. Just a few feet away from the man himself I find myself, a happily marred man in his late thirties, screaming the handsome one’s name with what seems to be an audience made up of 80 percent women. Welcome to the world of Magic Mike XXL, and the unique appeal of this global phenomenon.

Set three years on from the events of the Steven Soderbergh directed original, Magic Mike XXL is essentially a pumped-up, dumbed down version of its predecessor. Gone is the acting gravitas of Matthew McConaughey and his eccentric club owner Dallas, Alex Pettyfer‘s newbie The Kid (they’re in Macau lording it up for the big bucks), and pretty much all of the heart and soul of the quite brilliant first outing. Here, the action is taken onto the road with the remaining members of the Kings of Tampa heading for one last hoorah at one of the country’s biggest male stripper conventions.

Along for the ride this time is Jada Pinkett-Smith, whose character of Rome, a club owner, troupe emcee and former flame of the title character who essentially fills the void left by McConaughey. There’s also Amber Heard as pole dancer and wannabe photographer Zoe, and a whole host of supporting actors including Andie McDowell and Elizabeth Banks in what are essentially extended cameos. The plot is thinned out, very weak and to be honest, virtually non-existent. This is a film made up of strip dance, followed by strip dance, followed by yes, another strip dance; for 90% of its whopping 107 minutes. We have strip dances in workshops, strip dances in hot, muggy clubs; in drag bars, in a gas station, in a sultry Savannah members club and at that much promised end strip convention which ends the movie. Essentially, Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie, just a huge excuse to display endless set-pieces of male flesh on screen to fulfil the sexual fantasy of its audience – and it works wonderfully.

It’s difficult not to be drawn into this purely fantastical world. Tatum is once again electrifying in a role based loosely on his former life I (although we’ve probably gone way past reality now), and while certain scenes echo of that other franchise that he started out in (Step Up), with said strip dance scenes replacing ensemble dance routines, you can help but smile every time he’s gyrating in front of you. However, Tatum isn’t the stand-out here. That honour lands on the lap of the scene-stealing Joe Manganiello who provides Magic Mike XXL with its many laughs. The gas station stop off is perhaps the best scene in the movie, particularly if you’re a Backstreet Boys fan. The other boys also supply oodles of firm support, and all of them get their turn front and centre during the film’s climax, which oddly feels like a live, one take performance with director Gregory Jacobs opting for a sweeping single shot camera covering Pinkett-Smith’s lengthy monologues, rather than edited cuts between each of the boy’s’ swan-song.

Part-cabaret, part-bromantic boys fantasy and fantastical girls heavenly dream, Magic Mike XXL is almost like an alternative version of the first film that is pure (s)exploitation intent of serving the purpose of getting hold of your hard-eared cash. Pretty much everything that the trailers promise; a dazzling, magnificent journey that may well be the feel-good film of the summer.

Magic Mike XXL review, Paul Heath, June, 2015.

Magic Mike XXL opens in UK and UK cinemas from Friday 3rd July, 2015.