Magic Mike XXL

By: Amos Lassen

Three years have passed since Mike stripped in public and now he and the other Tampa Kings are ready to do one last big show in Myrtle Beach. Three years after Mike bowed out of the stripper life at the top of his game, he and the remaining Kings of Tampa hit the road to Myrtle Beach to put on one last blow-out performance

Steven Soderbergh follows the original "Magic Mike" with a smorgasbord of male strippers. Two of the originals, Matthew McConaughey's Dallas and Alex Pettyfer's Adam moved their stripping careers to Europe and now the Kings consist of beefcakes Ken (Matt Bomer), Tarzan (Kevin Nash), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello). Now if you are looking for a serious plot with a lot of intrigue, this is not the movie for you, it is not much more than a film that is having fun making us have fun too.

The guys are headed for the annual Myrtle Beach's annual stripper expo. One thing that bothers me about this film and its predecessor is that the producers and the director and even the guys themselves know that male strippers have a considerable gay male fan base and we see here that there is an undeniable sense of queer baiting going on even if it is mutated for the politically correct arena of today's increasingly aware world. Remember when no one would consider making a film for the gay community? It was not that long ago and "Magic Mike", in my opinion, is pandering for gay fans and gay dollars. Nonetheless, many will walk away from the movie after having been lightly entertained or perhaps titillated. Personally, I found the film to be something of a tease.

Something was pulling Mike back to rejoin the guys and when he agrees to do so, they begin a road trip. In the first film we had the perils of the business. Now the biggest danger is that the guy's driver, Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias), participates in a meditation exercise while he's driving the group's tour bus, which also doubles as a food truck business started by Tito (Adam Rodriguez). Fun replaces peril here.

Tito and Tobias want to their yogurt enterprise to succeed. As for the guys---Richie is worried that he's pushing 40 and still hasn't found a woman to love and who will accept him for his, well, most sizeable attribute and Ken wants to be an actor, but his biggest breaks so far have been a commercial and a gig in a costume at a major theme park.

The finale shows off how each man ties his passion into a dance routine and there is one fun scene when the guys make a group of well-to-do women feel better about their lives.

The movie is a lot better than it could have been and its free-form structure is fun and does allow for the characters to show off more than their bodies.