Magic Mike XXL ** (2015, Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez, Amber Heard) – Movie Review

Channing Tatum is back as male stripper Mike in the 2015 comedy-drama film Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to Magic Mike (2012), and that’s good news because he’s as entertaining as he is easy on the eye.

Channing Tatum is back as male stripper Mike in director Gregory Jacobs’s 2015 American comedy-drama film Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to Magic Mike (2012), and that’s very good news because he’s as entertaining as he is easy on the eye. He has a cheesy, goofy grin, a nice twinkle, and a good way with the witty banter. Like his character, he is three years older but still in prime beef condition.

But alas there’s no sign of Alex Pettyfer returning to reprise his role as the kid or Matthew McConaughey, who was in talks to reprise his role of Dallas but dropped because of financial reasons. So out goes the newbie and the old emcee format that proved basis for the success of the first film.

That gives them a chance for something completely different. But what? Best, then, to keep the other remaining members of the old gang of strippers and come up with some new kind of storyline. That’s the game plan. The ‘plot’ could hardly be simpler. Three years on after retiring and starting a modest furniture business, male entertainer Mike – still in prime beefcake shape – reunites with the remaining Kings of Tampa strippers and hits the road to Myrtle Beach, Florida, for one last megashow.

Cue a rambling road-trip format that gets less and less interesting as the trip wears on. After a bit, you are asking ‘are we there yet?’ At the er, climax, the strippers go out with a bang with a heck of a show, but, new routines aside, we’ve seen it all before. The old routines, stripping as firemen or cops, were just more fun, and more real. Does the guys’ bumping and grinding seem mechanical and the routines just routine now?

The best scene is early on when the strippers stop off at a raucous Jacksonville drag bar and enter an amateur voguing contest. It’s quirky and it’s fun and it’s less than totally straight like the rest of the movie. So, in the movie story, gay fans get to see the straight hunks, and the actual movie acknowledges that it might have some gay fans.

Though women are the actual target audience, it doesn’t really have a very good view of them. They’re just there to get over-excited when the over bromancing strippers take the shirts off. Andie MacDowell is embarrassed in a strident, unsympathetic role as trendy mother of the heroine (Amber Heard), surrounded by a clique of randy middle-agers, post-menopausal divorcees, who gets off with the XXL man, Tito. With Gabriel Iglesias’s Tobias conveniently hospitalised for most of the movie after a road crash, Jada Pinkett Smith takes over as the MC, and seems lost, a little girl in a big boys movie, but stuck with too much screen time.

Those big boys, by the way, are Joe Manganiello as Big Dick Richie, Kevin Nash as Tarzan, Matt Bomer as Ken and Adam Rodriguez as Tito. All of them are returning from the first movie, and the absence of Pettyfer and McConaughey gives them space to shine in the limelight.

It is written by Reid Carolin, the screen-writer of the first movie. A lot of the light-hearted, lively banter seems to be being made up as they go along, though some of it is very amusing. But talking of talk, there seems to be an awful lot of it till we get to the stripping. Surely no one comes to a Magic Mike sequel for the talk. Aren’t they’re just waiting for the strip-tease, dance number, lap dancing action?

Why don’t they make a Magic Mike movie for heterosexual men? They could call it Magic Mary. Oh wait, they did, and it was called Showgirls, in 1995. Like Showgirls which earned a record seven Razzies before it, Magic Mike XXL seems a vulnerable candidate for a Razzie award or two, maybe at least a nomination as Worst Sequel.

This is the first time that Steven Soderbergh, director of the original Magic Mike, is the cinematographer of a film he didn’t direct and instead the movie is directed by his colleague Gregory Jacobs. I’m afraid he’d probably be a vulnerable candidate for a Razzie nomination too. You know what those Razzie people are like.

Channing Tatum and Matt Bomer recently rode a float in the Los Angeles gay pride parade. So, good! So let’s be nice: both of them are a lot of fun in the movie.

It was released in the US on 1 July 2015, and grossed $122.5 million worldwide, against a budget of $14.8 million. A third film, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, was released in February 2023.

There were no Razzie awards, sadly, but it was the 2015 Winner of the Teen Choice Award for Choice Summer Movie Star: Male (Channing Tatum) and the 2016 Winner of the Dorian Award by GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics for Campy Flick of the Year, beating Fifty Shades of Grey, The Boy Next Door, Jupiter Ascending and Stonewall.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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