Magic Mike stands on bare ground again, after losing his furniture business during the pandemic. He's bartending at a charity event when he meets Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), a separated, jet-setting socialite.
It dawns on Max that Mike has a past of - ahem - dancing. She tells him to make a comeback! Pays well.
Around 10 minutes into "Magic Mike's Last Dance", Mike mounts Max (both are clothed, must know), and starts to peck at her, like a dog, primarily in the face and crotch region. The situation is comical and erotic (depends on who's watching), and also a reminder of how little sex there is to see in mainstream American films these days.
The film will never be so lively again. Max sees the light of some kind, and asks Mike to come with her to Britain. This condo in Miami? Phew! Just a simple secondary residence! Wait until you see the one in London! With its own butler and all! Again: Pays well.
To illustrate that "Magic Mike's Last Dance" is now moving from the US to England, Soderbergh chooses to film a pile of objects in a souvenir shop (small Paddington Bears, red double-deckers). All the most classic London clichés - under one roof! Time and money saved! It's so limp it's hard to believe, and it says everything about what the director thinks about us viewers: That we're idiots who don't deserve better.
What is it that Max wants with Mike in England? No more sex, actually. Not at first, anyway. No; The plan is to get revenge on the ex-husband in a much more sinister way.
Maxandra manages a hitherto venerable theatre, The Rattigan, which has been in her ex-husband's family for generations. Now she wants to put on a striptease show there to compromise and humiliate him! That'll teach him!
From here on out, "Magic Mike's Last Dance" proceeds like an Elvis Presley movie from the 1960s, only dumber. Max and Mike have the pleasure of testing out a series of talents drawn from the streets of London and the European continent. They have to overcome a couple of obstacles on the way, among them a gray mouse of a female bureaucrat who can certainly be "coaxed" into reason....
Reid Carolin's screenplay has to be one of the weakest ever made into a film by a highly respected director. The plot could have been dreamed up by an 11-year-old on order from The Disney Channel. The dialogues are painfully stupid. The characters are flat, even unsympathetic. I mean, this Max is a horrible, spoiled person.
Tatum is cool, and can dance. But his director displays an at best mediocre flair for capturing movement and choreography on camera. So not much to pick up there either.
Towards the end, "Magic Mike's Last Dance" becomes downright bizarre. Before the final half-hour's shockingly tame Chippendales show (No PG needed), Soderbergh inserts an intermission poster(!) possibly to emphasize how stupid he thinks all this is, and how little he cares.
Next, he leaves half of the scene to a woman (Juliette Motamed) we have barely met, and in no way cares about, and asks her to spout off a bunch of extremely transparent, quasi-feminist platitudes about "liberation".
Most incomprehensible of all: He asks Tatum to do the climactic dance with a woman other than Maxandra (namely Kylie Shea). What???
The effect is as satisfying as interrupted intercourse, and puts two red lines under what we've known for almost two hours already: That "Magic Mike's Last Dance" is an embarrassment for everyone involved, embarrassing for every imaginable gender and by a wide margin the worst , the most alarmingly amateur film Steven Soderbergh has put his name on.
The director has always been concerned with his versatility. Well, congratulations: He can now add pure rubbish to his CV.
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