'Magic Mike XXL' relentlessly targets its audience
鈥淢agic Mike XXL鈥� targets its audience as relentlessly as a personal trainer targets abs. This sequel to 鈥淢agic Mike鈥� mostly dispenses with plot in order to serve up what it does best:聽showcase male stripper gyrations. Those gyrations more closely resemble highly suggestive聽calisthenics, but, judging from the flurry of bills flung wantonly at the dancers by giddy ladies,聽ballet moves were not a requirement.
Given the arrant attempt to cash in on the surprise success of the first film (minus here the聽presence of Matthew McConaughey), 鈥淢agic Mike XXL鈥� is a lot better than it has a right to be.聽Channing Tatum, who is now, after this and 鈥淔oxcatcher,鈥� officially a good actor, is back as Mike,聽who joins up with his old buddies 鈥� Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), Tarzan (Kevin聽Nash), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias) 鈥� on a road trip from central Florida to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for an annual male stripper convention. The buddy-buddy badinage is raucous and raw but always good-natured, and that describes the film as聽well.
The excursions into heavy-duty dalliance are more funny than titillating, including a sequence聽set in a Victorian mansion presided over by an imperious hostess (Jada Pinkett Smith), and another set in the spacious homestead of a Southern belle (Andie MacDowell) celebrating her聽divorce with a bevy of other belles. And then, of course, there is the grand finale in Myrtle聽Beach, an almost otherworldly fantasia of flexing. What saves it all from being sordid is the open聽desire of the director, Gregory Jacobs, and his writer, Reid Carolin, to make sure the women in the film, not the male dancers, are ultimately the ones who are celebrated. Grade: B (Rated R for strong sexual content, pervasive language, some nudity and drug use.)
