Movie review: ‘Magic Mike XXL’: Not just the brotherhood of the traveling G-string

Imagine your typical road-trip movie, with all the bells and whistles: late-night confidences, driving montages, on-the-road romances, personal epiphanies. Now, add male strippers to the mix. This is "Magic Mike XXL".

Anyone looking forward to the grit and gravitas of the first film should check their expectations at the door, and consider the possibility that hot male actors can be objectified as gratuitously as their female counterparts. While the first movie played at exposing the sleazy underbelly of the profession, "Magic Mike XXL" takes a more light-hearted view. Perhaps because its titular character (played by Channing Tatum) has left the biz and is struggling to keep his business in the black—and therefore, is able to look back at his past with fondness.

Or it could be because the remaining Kings of Tampa did not intend to go gently into the night, and were prepared to give their all for one last time in the spotlight.

Or perhaps producers simply cottoned on to the fact that it isn’t the sob story that gets dollars in the G-string, but six-pack abs and slick moves. The plot is flimsy at best, merely serving to move Mike and company from Florida to the annual stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but it makes up for this shortfall with its determination to show viewers nothing less than a good time.

How so? By capitalizing on the absence of Matthew McConnaughey’s scene-stealing Dallas and beefing up the screen presence of supporting cast members Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, and Kevin Nash, who were nothing more than manly eye candy in the previous film. Here, we find out that they, like Mike, have ambitions beyond exotic dancing and in between the running jokes on artisanal fro-yo and the travails of well-endowed men lies an astute observation about patriarchy: that even manly men find imposed standards of masculinity and sexuality problematic. It is only by articulating their aspirations through dance that the Kings of Tampa are able to find fulfillment in their routine.

The role of the MC is to prime the audience for the striptease; in "Magic Mike XXL", this position is filled by Jada Pinkett-Smith as Rome, the owner of a private ladies entertainment club in Savannah. Think the anti-Playboy Mansion, where women are afforded a safe space to express their desires; the club’s staff (Stephen “tWitch” Boss, Michael Strahan, and Donald Glover) also balances the movie’s primarily white male cast. Rome steps into Dallas’s shoes, but instead of dictating the routines, enables the guys to do their own thing. By allowing a female MC to control the show—without denying the male strippers creative freedom—the movie concretizes the importance of play, consent, and respect in any form of sexual intimacy, a point further explored when the gang unwittingly hijacks an amigas night in and end up acting as sex therapists to the real housewives of Georgia. Yes, the scene is played for laughs, but the guys do not belittle the concerns raised by the women.

That said, "Magic Mike XXL" has its share of missteps: cheesy lines, everything related to Amber Heard, and an ending that is abrupt and lacks resolution, but one may argue that audiences of a strip show are not looking for concrete answers, merely a temporary respite from the trials of the real world, where the menfolk are not as ripped nor as sensitive. — BM, GMA News

"Magic Mike XXL" opens in theaters on July 15.