Film

Magic Mike XXL’ is a dreadful sequel

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Is the magic gone from the Magic Mike franchise with its XXL sequel?

One star

Magic Mike XXL Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer. Directed by Gregory Jacobs. Rated R. Now playing.

Before becoming an unexpected cultural phenomenon, 2012’s Magic Mike started as a passion project for star Channing Tatum and director Steven Soderbergh, who financed the movie themselves. Soderbergh took Tatum’s fictionalized version of his male-stripper past and made it into a stylish if superficial meditation on the temptations of easy money and fast living, compensating for the weaknesses in Reid Carolin’s script with evocative montages, unexpected juxtapositions and a moody color palette. Magic Mike isn’t a great Soderbergh movie, but Soderbergh does bring something great to it.

The movie’s popularity, however, is based far more on its preponderance of shirtless, muscular, gyrating men than on Soderbergh’s skills as a filmmaker, and Soderbergh’s subsequent quasi-retirement means that he declined to return as director for sequel Magic Mike XXL. Still, Soderbergh’s replacement is his veteran first assistant director Gregory Jacobs, and Soderbergh himself is on board not only as an executive producer but also as cinematographer and editor. Whatever his influence may or may not have been on the direction, though, XXL lacks any hint of the creativity or style he brought to the original. It’s every bit the cheesy, brainless exercise in audience pandering that many expected from the first movie.

XXL is barely even a movie at all; the plot is a string of minimally connected set pieces that exist mainly to showcase the stars’ abs, and by the end it devolves into little more than a filmed dance performance, complete with an auditorium full of shrieking women. After spending an entire movie agonizing over his decision to leave stripping behind, Mike (Tatum) requires virtually no convincing to join his former bros on a road trip to a stripper convention. Supporting players Matthew McConaughey, Alex Pettyfer and Cody Horn, whose characters were central to the first movie’s plot, have all been hastily written out, replaced by a string of glorified celebrity cameos.

The contemplative tone that balanced out the first movie’s exuberant dance scenes is completely gone; XXL has about as much dramatic complexity as Thunder From Down Under. Without even the pretense of realism, XXL manages to make its predecessor look retroactively worse, dismissing any idea of thoughtfulness or character development in favor of repetitive bumping and grinding. XXL turns Magic Mike into a franchise that shamelessly caters to fans who crave only a parade of beefcake, forgetting that what made it work in the first place was its creators’ artistic vision.

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