Stars: Channing Tatum, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez, Gabriel Iglesias, Andie MacDowell, Amber Heard, Jada Pinkett Smith, Elizabeth Banks, Danny Glover
Director: Gregory Jacobs
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The film, which follows a world after Dallas (McConaughey) and the Kid (Alex Pettyfer, who will also likely never be as good as he was in the original), shows the Cock-Rocking Kings of Tampa as they set off on a road adventure to a major stripper convention in Myrtle Beach. Along the way they get Magic Mike to return to his stripping roots, mostly because his new life is in desperate need of energy and cash flow (his girlfriend Brooke, played quite well by Cody Horn in the original and missing from this film, has broken up with him and he is struggling to get his furniture business off the ground), and the group find themselves all realizing what life will be like after the stripping game has ended, particularly without their machiavellian leader Dallas no longer there to call the shots.
The movie makes a few key decisions right away, principally promoting Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello to much more prominent roles in the cast (due likely to their increased star power in the past few years thanks to Bomer's Normal Heart turn and Manganiello's work on True Blood, which gets a lovely inside joke when he encounters a vampire-themed stripper show), and by not taking away the weird in all of the scenes. Indeed, the actual road trip itself is the best part of the movie, which is rare considering what a tired genre this is. The film doesn't have the sexual energy that the first film does, which is odd because of the way that Magic Mike's reverse objectification really did a number on Hollywood (stars such as Chris Pratt and Aaron Johnson are basically required to get half-naked in cover shoots now in the same way that their female peers are as well...not sure if this is a good thing exactly, but it's definitely a closer-to-equal thing). With the exception of the strip show, the only off-hand sort of nudity we have in the film (similar to the now famous opening scene of Channing Tatum completely nude walking to the bathroom in the original film) is at a pool with Joe Manganiello. Instead, we have these men seeing the strangeness of people's reactions to them, as well as getting inside equally cloistered and fascinating worlds. I loved the hilarious scene of Manganiello stripping for a dour gas station attendant, as well as the bizarre women's club scene with Jada Pinkett Smith (with all of her queen's in a weirdly erotic scene, but mostly because you can't quite tell which direction Smith's sexual energy is going toward-the women or the men or both), and the great sequence where Andie MacDowell leads a group of undersexed rich housewives in conversation with these men. All of these scenes have that same great weirdness that occasionally permeated in the original film in McConaughey's work. If they couldn't get the man himself (I maintain to this day that McConaughey's Oscar, if he should have one, belonged to him for this movie and not Dallas Buyers Club) they at least kept a bit of Dallas' eccentricity in these scenes.
The actual stripping scene, quite frankly, feels a bit hammy as a result. I hated the fact that Pinkett Smith comes back to rescue the show or that Donald Glover is taken out of his weird little cameo in the story (as a rapping stripper)-I liked the idea of all of these little worlds existing along the way, rather than them coming back in a generic "all of the stars" style scene at the end of the film. The actual stripping numbers are hardly what one could call unstimulating (ahem), but they also feel too much like a product of the original film, and not of this character-based study. They've missed too many opportunities for thongs and, well, dongs, at this point to make us feel like a bunch of pecs is the right solution. The film's timidity about nudity, particularly with the title XXL is an odd juxtaposition that I feel might have taken us a step back in terms of progressive sexual politics (quite frankly up until that last scene we've seen nearly as much skin from women as we have men), and not one that feels great and groundbreaking. The movie also gets a little too cliched in those final scenes, with forced scenes between Channing Tatum and Kevin Nash and a bit too much expositional dialogue to really work against the more organic scenes we've witness earlier. The movie never quite gets as good as the original, but the ending is probably the worst scene even if it's the most titillating.
It's worth noting that while it's never as refreshing as what he did three years ago, Tatum is still able to brilliantly effervesce and flirt with anything that moves. Amber Heard is hardly a great actor, but neither quite frankly was Cody Horn and he still gets great scenes out of her (Horn was better in her role as "girlfriend," though, as she brought a cool rhythm to the film that Heard seems to just be copying here). The rest of the cast aren't as natural in front of the camera as Tatum (and quite frankly none of them are the actor that he is), so it feels a little bit forced. I liked what Donald Glover and Jada Pinkett Smith did in their initial club scenes, but they lose some of the special later on in the film when they reappear and become more standardized in the light of day, and while Joe Manganiello and Matt Bomer know that this is their time to ham it up, they occasionally feel two-dimensional in the way that Tatum (and Pettyfer and McConaughey) never did.
All-in-all, as a result, we get a film I highly-recommend (if only because it is, like the original, different than what you would expect and never less than very watchable), though nowhere near the masterpiece the original was. Those were my thoughts-how about yours? The original brought out people's opinions in huge numbers, so I suspect the sequel will as well. What'd you think of Magic Mike XXL?
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