‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’: Another gem from the Soderbergh formula

By Jake Skubish

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is available on Max.

Every Steven Soderbergh movie is the same. Yes, the notoriously prolific director has made films about everything ranging from a global pandemic to Che Guevara to an NBA lockout. But his films can always be distilled down to a scene at the beginning of Soderbergh’s iconic heist film Ocean’s Eleven. In the scene, Rusty (Brad Pitt) is asking Danny (George Clooney) why he wants to pull this job.

“Because the house always wins,” Danny says. “Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big. And then you take the house.”

This is the Soderbergh formula in a nutshell: scrappy outsiders banding together against an unjust system of wealth and power, attempting to win a rigged game with the ace up their sleeve. In Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the wealthy husband of London socialite Max (Salma Hayek), amidst the couple’s impending divorce, uses his influence to shut down a theatrical revival she is putting on. The ace up her sleeve is Magic Mike (Channing Tatum).

The film begins with Mike bartending at a swanky Miami party after losing his furniture business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given Soderbergh’s keen eye toward economic injustice, it should be no surprise that he (along with Reid Carolin, author of the film’s whip-smart screenplay) has made one of the most subtly effective movies about the pandemic. Magic Mike’s Last Dance is interwoven with the connections lost during the pandemic: Mike chats with his buddies from Magic Mike XXL over Zoom, apologizing for losing touch with them, and the film's climax is about a theater reopening. A voiceover midway through the film tells us that “one of the most primal feelings human beings experience is the desire to belong, to feel connected to other beings,” and Soderbergh’s film eventually becomes an appeal for returning to that connection in a post-pandemic world.

At the beginning, though, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is trained on the inequities the pandemic wrought. The rich are carrying on with their festivities like nothing ever happened, while working people and artists like Mike are left to start over. That Mike is an artist is inarguable after his first dance scene of the film. Max, the host of the party, calls him into the house after hearing he is a dancer. She offers him $6,000 for a dance, an amount Mike can’t turn down. Despite his reluctance, Mike starts meticulously scoping out the room and setting up the props he’ll need. He’s doing it for the money, but dancing is his passion — he can’t start the performance without investing his care and attention.

The whole film hinges on the effectiveness of this scene. The dance convinces Max to bring Mike with her back to London to spice up a production of the play “Isabel Ascendant,” both because of their sexual and romantic connection and because she sees his value as an artist. When Max says things to Mike like “You came along and gave me this unexpected, magical moment that made me remember who I really was,” the movie fails if we don’t feel that spark on screen.

Thankfully we do, and the scene is thrilling on both levels: It’s sexy, and it’s an artfully curated performance. Upon Max’s proposal Mike immediately tests the structural integrity of a metal shelving unit, leading to the most creatively erotic move of the sequence. After the dance Soderbergh skips over an implied sex scene to show Max and Mike in bed together, an omission that in other films typically feels like a lame shortcut — as if the filmmaker doesn’t know how to approach the on-screen sex. Here, it makes sense: We’ve already witnessed the burst of sensuality between these characters without needing to see this at all. Could one dance really inspire all the feelings that Max describes? Under Soderbergh’s direction, I believe it.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is Tatum’s fifth collaboration with Soderbergh as director, and he is terrific in the role. Tatum is one of Hollywood’s most outrageously charming and underrated movie stars. There is, of course, the physicality often on display in the Magic Mike franchise, a presence which Tatum has had going all the way back to Step Up. But between his performance as Magic Mike in 2023 and his days as a 2000s heartthrob, Tatum has continued to add more and more depth to his performances. One of his great strengths is his ability to switch easily between comedy and drama. Tatum is hilarious as a dim-witted meathead in the 21 Jump Street films, and his cameo in This Is the End is one of the funniest, I can’t believe he did that scenes you’ll ever see. Yet he is still highly effective in a much more serious drama like Foxcatcher. In films like his stellar directorial debut last year, Dog, Tatum seamlessly marries these talents, creating a character whose moments of broad comedy and earnest emotional anguish never feel disjointed.

I’ve always admired just how willing Tatum is to play characters who are morally complicated, or even just odd or unsympathetic. This may be easier when you are wildly hot, but there is something to be said for the range of roles Tatum is willing to take on. He is an unsettling weirdo in Foxcatcher, and often tortured and antagonistic in Dog. He is unintelligent in 21 Jump Street and unafraid to be silly in a small role in the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! And what he risks playing himself in This Is the End is no small thing.

This willingness to stretch the boundaries of his screen persona further than other leading men is, I think, not unrelated to the fact that Tatum’s last two performances, Magic Mike’s Last Dance and The Lost City, find him playing opposite a love interest more than 10 years older than him. There’s a maturity to his flexible persona, and a humility to his performances that somehow never comes off as self-serving. Tatum has sex appeal without excessive narcissism or aggression, and invokes allyship without ever seeming cringy. The Magic Mike franchise is carried by his performances, and I hope Soderebergh continues to collaborate with him into the future.

Tatum and Hayek’s relationship is the foundation of Magic Mike’s Last Dance, but in the third act they briefly take a backseat to the theatrical production the film has been building toward. It’s a blast, a fun and sensual extravaganza. For all his intellect Soderbergh is fundamentally an entertainer, which is why this tale of economic justice is set in the world of absurdly hot and athletic dancers. Few directors are more adept at capturing beautiful people in motion than Soderbergh, and the last dance sequence of the show is something special.

The film’s resolution also perfectly thematically wraps the Magic Mike franchise, a series about people who value creating something together more than they value the money that could come from creating it. It’s a message that never feels like a lesson to be learned, but something clever tucked inside a scintillating piece of entertainment. Max’s butler Victor (Ayub Khan-Din) articulates the Soderbergh ethos well near the end of the film: “If there’s anything I’ve learned,” he tells Max’s daughter Zadie (Jemelia George), “It’s that you can’t tell people anything. They have to have an experience.”

Magic Mike’s Last Dance gives us one. It’s full of ideas but never feels weighed down by them; first and foremost it’s a good time, just like all Soderbergh films. That’s why it’s not an insult to say that all of his films are the same. He’s always circling the same territory, but it’s a territory that nobody understands better than him. Maybe the house doesn’t always win, because when Soderbergh sits down at the table he always manages to pull a perfect hand.