“Magic” Mike Lane is unable to stop bumping and grinding. He's the male stripper's equivalent of a bank robber or cowboy who claims to be retired but is enticed back into action for one last job. “Magic "Mike's Last Dance," the third film starring Channing Tatum as a big-hearted, iron-thewed Florida stripper, knows that unless he's dancing, Mike doesn't feel truly fulfilled.


To its credit, Steven Soderbergh's new film completes the "I'm done, don't ask me to dance" ritual in under ten minutes. Mike lost his furniture business during the pandemic and now works as a bartender at catered events in Miami, according to a brief prologue. This is where he meets Max (Salma Hayek Pinault), the estranged and soon-to-be-divorced wife of a wealthy Londoner. Max offers Mike a fortune for one last dance. After a brief pantomime of refusal, he agrees, and the experience is so mind-blowing for Max (the sex afterwards is also fantastic) that she invites him to London to create and choreograph a stage production that will bring the Magic Mike experience to the West End. This is something that happens all the time.


The rest of the film is a backstage drama about Mike and Max learning how to be a couple while working on the show and attempting to keep it from being shut down by Max's husband for violating historic district architectural codes, etc. All of this is just a prelude to Max and Mike's inevitable and well-deserved happy endings as lovers and artistic collaborators.


"Magic Mike's Last Dance" is a mishmash that takes itself seriously as entertainment but plays other ambitions off lightly. There are dance numbers, romantic melodrama plot twists, and odd but intriguing 19th-century allusions (Max's teenage daughter Zadie, played by Jemilia George, narrates Mike's ascension through London's upper echelons as if reading from a 19th-century Edith Wharton-esque novel). Many scenes put the working-class hero in situations where he is completely out of his element. "Uh, we're doin' it!" Mike says when asked about his plans for Act Three.


As is frequently the case with Soderbergh, who has been at the top of the directorial heap for over 20 years but retains a hustling gig-point worker's of view, "Magic Mike's Last Dance" is more attentive to details of class difference than many Hollywood movies set in this environment would be. When Max and Mike are discussing art, love, and happiness, the film will occasionally cut to Max's butler Victor, played by Ayub Khan Din, as if to remind us that very few people have the time to talk about such things without tedious everyday tasks fragmenting their attention.


Take note, too, of Tatum's sensitive portrayal of Mike's reactions to his sudden immersion into a new reality in which he does not have to struggle to survive. He appears excited but also wary, as if he expects it all to go away like his furniture business. Tatum grew up in the American south and made it in Hollywood despite having no rich or famous parents or prior industry connections. He's kept a smidgeon of "I can't believe this is happening to me" energy, which he uses whenever he plays Mike, perhaps even more so in this one. We understand Mike's dismay at the opportunities that have fallen into his lap. But we also understand that he's the type of guy who can adjust quickly because he's spent the majority of his life catering to these types of people and knows how to give them the fantasies they crave without giving up too much of his soul.


This film serves as a pretext for Tatum, Soderbergh, and screenwriter Reid Carolin (who wrote the previous two "Magic Mike" films) to play around with a great character one more time without being repetitive. After giving us "Saturday Night Fever With a Stripper, Combined with a Mentor-Whose-Pupil-Goes-Bad Film" (aka "Magic Mike") and "Female Empowerment Fantasy and Male Bonding Comedy Disguised as a Comedic Road Movie with References To Apocalypse Now and The Odyssey" (aka "Magic Mike XXL"), they've given us something completely different: a film about desire, monogamous love, creativity, and freedom, but never in a way that makes you cringe. (Well, maybe a few times—mostly when characters repeat slogans about economic inequality that are simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker.)


At the same time, this is one of Soderbergh's witty self-referential comedies. It's not as abrasive and absurd as Soderbergh's quasi-experimental comedy "Schizopolis," or as voluptuously showy as "Oceans 12." (the one in the franchise where Julia Roberts plays both her regular character and "Julia Roberts"). But it's as much about Mike and Max and the dance production as it is about moviemaking, the artistic process, and the various types of cinema and fiction it draws on. And it's about the idea that a stylish diversion can still have substance, as demonstrated by so many of Soderbergh's projects. ("This show isn't about getting dick," Max tells their creative team, pausing for a nanosecond before adding, "Only.")


None of this would work if Tatum wasn't every inch the movie star, and possibly the last American-born A-list movie actor who can truly dance and is given opportunities to do so. He dances with his leading lady a few times in this film, but the majority of their tangos are emotional and intellectual, and the film respects her ferocious energy and focus enough to let her take the spotlight frequently.


Nobody is going to write dissertations on the intricate architecture of this film's storytelling. It simply goes where it needs to go or feels like going, similar to the other two films, but in a different way. All of this builds up to the big show (another movie-format cliche), and when the curtain finally rises, revealing a cabaret-ish production that's essentially the same one Tatum co-created that's currently a smash in London, complete with audience participation, the film cleverly finds ways to connect what's happening onstage to what's happening within Mike and Max.


"Magic Mike's Last Dance" is primarily about fit, graceful bodies moving through space. Whether the actors are dancing sex that would earn the film an NC-17 rating if the actors weren't clothed, performing a sort of Bob Fosse-meets-"Singin' in the Rain" routine onstage, or simply walking and talking around London while coping with anxieties that will smother happiness if not kept in check, Soderbergh and Tatum channel a primal sense of why people love watching movies. Soderbergh frequently mocks the Marvel films for being sexless, but the way he shoots Mike and the other dancers shows that he understands this series is an R-rated fantasy for adults with libidos. Mike appears onstage in a flash of light, providing an instant escape to a world of aesthetic and sexual bliss, but he never crosses boundaries without first obtaining permission. When it's finished, he returns the customer to her seat and thanks her.



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