Warner Bros. Pictures
Magic Mike became an unlikely hit in 2012 because it sold itself as a fun movie about male strippers featuring some of the hottest bodies … erm, actors on the scene – Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, Alex Pettyfer and Matthew McConaughey. The movie started off like that, but ultimately bummed out its audience with a dramatic plot that sucked all of the fun out of the movie.
When Magic Mike XXL was announced, star Tatum promised the sequel would be everything audiences expected from the first movie but didn’t get. Yet the finished film didn’t quite turn out that way, and even worse, featured even less dancing and stripping than the first movie! If anything, I believe the audiences wanted more of that, and failing to deliver on the promise, the sequel made a little more than half of the original’s gross.
The story of Magic Mike XXL picks up three years after the end of the first movie (so, basically real time). Mike is struggling to keep his custom furniture design business running while the core group, Richie (Manganiello), Tarzan (Kevin Nash), Ken (Bomer), Tito (Rodriguez) and MC Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias), are planning to take off for a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach for one last hurrah. To explain the absence of Dallas (McConaughey) and Adam (Pettyfer), we’re told Dallas and the kid left to take a new show on the road for a world tour, leaving the other guys high and dry.
Mike gets a call that makes it sound like Dallas is dead, meets the guys at what he thinks is a wake (but is actually a party), hears their plan and eventually decides to join them on their road trip from Florida to Myrtle Beach. Along the way, Richie loses his confidence and the group loses Tobias in an accident that leaves him hospitalized. With no MC, they have no chance of getting into the convention. A lucky plot convenience places the guys on a path straight for an old flame of Mike’s who also happens to be an MC, Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith). She turns down Mike’s request to MC for them, but gives them a driver/stripper/singer, Andre (Donald Glover), to get them to where they need to go … and inexplicably end up at some rich lady’s home (Nancy, played by Andie MacDowell) where Richie regains his confidence and she gives them a car to take them the rest of the way to Myrtle Beach.
But will they run up against a brick wall in the form of Paris (Elizabeth Banks) who won’t let them in without an MC, or will Rome arrive in the nick of time? What do you think?
I will admit that Magic Mike XXL isn’t quite the downer the first film was, but this one ends up being more a series of vignettes than a completely coherent story. In addition to the familiar faces already encountered, Mike meets a girl on the beach before the trip, Zoe (Amber Heard), who just happens to be at Nancy’s house and finds herself falling for Mike, even though she told him she wasn’t into guys at the moment, and Michael Strahan pops up out of nowhere as a stripper at Rome’s establishment, as does Stephen ‘tWitch’ Boss (as dancer Malik). Then there’s the infamous gas station scene where Richie grinds against a refrigerator case, and a stop at a drag club. None of these things have any real importance to the plot other than to give the guys a little more time to dance (but not really strip).
And that is where the film is really lacking. There were more scenes of dancing in the first movie, while this one really wants to save it all up for the grand finale at the convention. Except, that is a huge letdown as well, especially since we see the guys rehearsing new material together and they never dance as a group at the convention except to strut out on stage before their individual numbers. Each of the guys get a short number while Mike gets a pretty elaborate and amazing dance mirroring the moves of Malik with two women from the audience — one of whom happens to be Zoe, who appears to flip back to liking men after having Mike’s crotch thrusting all over her body. The show should have ended with a group number (we see other groups backstage rehearsing their own group numbers), but the movie just ends without any real resolution or satisfaction. Once word got out, it’s easy to see why the film failed to match its predecessor’s success.
The Blu-ray, now available from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (which generously provided a copy to Hotchka for review), looks and sounds as good as it did in theaters. The high def video accurately replicates the film’s saturated color palette, courtesy of Steven Soderbergh (who directed the original but took on the job of cinematographer and editor for this one, under assumed names), also keeping the darker scenes stable with no visible artifacting. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio also delivers, keeping the voices front and center while using the surrounds and subwoofer to accurately duplicate a club atmosphere during the dance scenes. No complaints on either visual or audio presentation.
Like the original Magic Mike Blu-ray, Magic Mike XXL is just as scarce with its special features (which doesn’t even include a trailer):
- “The Moves of Magic Mike XXL” (8:35) looks at the choreography created for the movie with comments from the cast and choreographers Alison Faulk and Teresa Espinosa. While the actual movie is a bit of a downer, the behind-the-scenes footage shows that everyone seemed to be having a great time.
- “Extended Malik Dance Scene” (3:42) shows a little more of the dance performed by Malik at Rome’s club.
- “Georgia” (2:09) offers a very brief look at the locations in Georgia used in the movie to represent the route from Florida to South Carolina, with a rare on-screen appearance from Soderbergh discussing his love of his home state.
While Magic Mike XXL doesn’t quite deliver as a complete film, and while the disc offers very little in the way of special features, at least the high quality of the production is represented with the film’s presentation on Blu-ray. But by not providing what people actually wanted from the first movie, it’s really hard to get behind recommending this one as a satisfying follow-up.
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