Francesca Steele

Magic Mike XXL reviewed: stripping can be sexy – but lying on a pinned-down woman’s face is not

It’s hard to overstate how much I wanted to like Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to the 2012 Steven Soderbergh hit about male strippers. I have long proclaimed loudly to anyone who will listen that the first film is a stroke of genius, a subtle, sweet and, yes, gloriously sweaty exploration not just of women’s desire but of men’s too. It also, incidentally, features one of the last pre-Oscar performances from Matthew McConaughey before he got all serious in True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club, working that pop-eyed southern charm and those absurdly large abs in a tiny yellow crop-top and grotesquely leathery y-fronts until the audience wasn’t sure whether it was tickled or turned on.

We had already been alerted to the tragedy that there would be no McConaughey in the second film. And yet the trailer was still full of promise, striking that very fine balance between self-aware absurdity and genuine sexiness. It mostly features Channing Tatum, on whose real-life memories of stripping the films are loosely based, operating an electric saw in an unmistakeably sexual manner to the bump ‘n’ grind beats of Ginuwine’s 90s hit ‘Pony’, gyrating uncontrollably on the very tables where his character, ‘magic’ Mike, now makes the hideous custom furniture he longed to set up as a business when we met him three years earlier. Boy, that man can dance. It’s self-consciously silly, very sexy and ends with a cheeky nod to its fanbase, a tagline that simply reads: ‘You’re welcome’.

Sadly though, the trailer is the best thing about this second film, which has none of the magnetism or wit of the first. It’s a road-trip movie that takes us on a tour of the best stripping venues the southern states apparently have to offer, without ever really arriving anywhere.

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