Magic Mike 3 was a flop and a terrible letdown for the series, but Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault pull off one hilarious dance. New on Netflix now.
A version of this essay originally ran in conjunction with Magic Mike’s Last Dance’s arrival on digital streaming. It has been updated and reposted in conjunction with the film’s arrival on Netflix.
Compared to 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, was a box-office whiff. The third Magic Mike movie is intended as the final installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a heart of gold, a side business in carpentry, and a thoroughly explored philosophy about women’s pleasure. But unlike the previous Magic Mike movies, it never built a fandom or became a center of online discussion — it barely made a ripple when it hit theaters in February 2023.
Only a few months after its theatrical release, Magic Mike’s Last Dance arrived on Max, the platform it was originally made for. And as of February 2024, it’s streaming on Netflix as well. The crowd of people perpetually looking for something new to watch on Netflix may finally watch it this time. But they probably shouldn’t. It’s a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed exercise in corporate branding. Frankly, there’s only one scene in Magic Mike’s Last Dance that’s really worth watching, at least for fans of the previous movies, and it comes early in the film.
For Netflix subscribers (and impatient digital renters), the sequence starts about eight minutes in, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is called to meet with his employer of the moment, a rich, bored woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry business under, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering company Maxandra hires for her latest fundraising gig. Depressed over her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from one of Mike’s exes that he does a “silly dance” that might cheer her up. She’s willing to offer him $6,000 for a private show.
Mike says he doesn’t dance anymore — but lured by the money and stung by the “silly dance” description, he changes his mind, clears the surfaces in Maxandra’s house of potted plants and knickknacks, and gives her a solo performance that doesn’t even try to masquerade as anything other than highly theatrical, only-in-the-movies foreplay.
