Review: 'Magic Mike's Last Dance' has a silly plot, but when Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek are dancing steamily, the story won't matter

If I was able to separate what works from what doesn’t in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” I’d borrow the rating system from “A Chorus Line” — dance: 10; coherence: 3.

The third installment of the franchise has our hero, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), back on the bottom of the economic staircase — losing his business in the pandemic economy, and back tending bar for catered events. Occasionally one of the super-rich folks at a fundraiser he’s working will recognize him from his old job as a stripper — a job he swears he has given up for good.

However, like another Floridian, Tom Brady, Mike finds he just can’t quit. After one bartending gig, the client — Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault) — offers him a large sum of money to demonstrate his lap-dancing skills. Mike obliges, but when they end up in bed together, Mike magnanimously declares he wasn’t going to take her money anyway.

Maxandra makes Mike a counter-offer: A trip to London, for a monthlong job. Maxandra, we’re told, is in the middle of a nasty divorce to Roger Rattigan (Alan Cox), a media billionaire who doesn’t want to let her go. One asset Maxandra is keeping in the divorce is an old theater, which has been playing the same stodgy costume drama for years. We’re told that Maxandra was in the cast 20 years earlier, which is where she met Roger, who was sentimental enough to bankroll it in perpetuity. 

Maxandra, not so sentimental, wants to undo the patriarchal bent of the play, and thinks Mike has the vision to transform it into a treatise on feminine desire. And strippers. Mike agrees to direct the show, but he makes it clear to Maxandra that he won’t be dancing — a disappointment to any woman in the audience who believes it, and doesn’t suss out that Tatum’s going to be putting on his moves at some point.

So, yes, the plot here — screenwriter Reid Carolin, who wrote the first two “Magic Mike” movies, is back for the trilogy — is as tearaway as the costumes the male stripper revue wears. Adding Maxandra’s grumpy valet, Victor (Ayub Khan-Din), for comic relief doesn’t help matters. Nor does the addition of Maxandra’s sullen teen daughter, Zadie (newcomer Jemelia George), who also provides the droning narration that sounds like a poorly researched term paper on dance.

Steven Soderbergh returns to directing for this third installment (he did the first one, then handed off “Magic Mike XXL” to his frequent second-unit director Gregory Jacobs), and he seems so wrapped up in the dance numbers that he doesn’t notice the movie’s flimsy excuse for a plot.

With the dancing here, exuberantly performed and beautifully captured (by Soderbergh as cinematographer, using his Peter Andrews alias), some may not care about the lack of good sense in the story department. The opening duet between Tatum and Hayek Pinault shows both still have the moves and the sex appeal. (Men of a certain age fondly remember Hayek in “From Dusk Till Dawn,” pouring tequila down her leg into Quentin Tarantino’s toe-sucking mouth.)

The seductive, sultry dancing isn’t quite enough to make audiences overlook the storytelling shortcomings in  “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” At least, not for me. Your mileage, and your willingness to drool over Tatum’s six-pack abs, may vary.

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‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material and language. Running time: 112 minutes.