Essential Dance Films: Sean Geraghty on MAGIC MIKE XXL
THE GODFATHER PART II. ALIENS. THE DARK KNIGHT. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. These movies are some of the greatest sequels of all time. And in the summer of 2015, director Gregory Jacobs, screenwriter Reid Carolin, and the creative partnership of Channing Tatum and Steven Soderbergh added a new entry to that exclusive and celebrated list: MAGIC MIKE XXL.
If that sounds hyperbolic to you, well, 1. I’m hoping you haven’t seen the movie, 2. GO SEE IT, and 3. That’s entirely befitting MAGIC MIKE XXL. This is a film that singlehandedly refutes the old adage about there being too much of a good thing — then throws a leopard-print thong in that adage’s face. The movie is hyperbolic. It’s XXL.
I am a convert to MAGIC MIKE XXL’s cause. I was a huge fan of the first MAGIC MIKE. Here was a film in the tradition of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and GOOD WILL HUNTING — a film about working class folks and a lead character who finally breaks free to chase his dreams and live up to his potential. And like its cinematic forebears, it isn’t really about the disco dancing, or the complex mathematics, or the stripping. It’s a movie about the Great Recession, about strivers on the forgotten fringes of society, and it’s about Mike’s dream of building hand-crafted furniture from found objects. As some have pointed out, there are even comparisons to be made between its plot and Oliver Twist, with Alex Pettyfer’s character as Oliver, Tatum’s Magic Mike as the Artful Dodger, and Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas as a Southern fried Fagin, manipulative puppet master to his gang of lost boys.
So, I was skeptical about a sequel. I didn’t want a movie where Mike returned to his former life, a life that seemed as depressing offstage as it was enjoyable on stage. I worried that Mike’s character arc would be reversed, making him give up on his driftwood coffee table dreams just as he finally pursued them, all for what seemed like an unnecessary sequel. An unnecessary sequel without Soderbergh directing or full-on McConaissance McConaughey seductively crooning to the ladies of Tampa in black leather and a cowboy hat.
I shouldn’t have worried.
Because MAGIC MIKE XXL isn’t a step backward, it is a brilliant left turn. MAGIC MIKE focused on the gritty, grounded, darker side behind the spectacle. But XXL is all about the good side that the first film backgrounded in its depiction of the strip circuit’s seedy underbelly of drugs and greed. XXL is about the joy of dance. The movie begins with Mike rediscovering that joy. Realizing that he misses it. That he’s denying an essential part of himself by leaving it behind. In one solo dance sequence, I did a complete 180 on whether Mike should return to stripping again. And part of the reason why is because the movie has taken a left-turn away from dark realism and into aspirational fantasy.
XXL is not fully a fantasy film, but it fulfills a lot of fantasies. Not just with its virtuosic dance routines, but also in the movie’s presentation of a better world populated almost exclusively by enlightened people. While the first MAGIC MIKE takes place in the world as it is, this is the world as we’d like it to be. A world with male characters largely free of toxic masculinity, who love people of all genders, orientations, ages, races, and body types — and want to entertain them all. MAGIC MIKE XXL doesn’t even really have a conflict. The stripping convention at the end of the movie isn’t a competition. The whole movie is simply about a group of buddies who are supportive of one another’s dreams and sensitive to one another’s feelings as they share their joy and talent for stripping on an amiable cross-country road trip where everyone they meet is happier for meeting them. Just like its characters, this movie is just here to please. Normally, a lack of stakes makes a story weightless, in this case it allows the movie to soar. It’s magic.
The summer it was released, I was on a cross-country road trip of my own. We got tickets for a midday showing in Austin, Texas. About 12 other people were in the audience. And it was the loudest filmgoing experience of my life. There are so many shout-at-the-screen great moments, it’s impossible to list them all here. Cheetos and water… Andie MacDowell helping Joe Manganiello’s Ritchie find the right fit… Jada Pinkett Smith’s unbelievable emceeing… Channing Tatum and Twitch’s insane mirror routine — actually, the ENTIRE last 20 minutes.
I would say don’t tempt fate by making another, but I’m done doubting this franchise. I’ve got a good feeling MAGIC MIKE XXX could join the even shorter list of great threequels.
