Steven Soderbergh (2012)

Word has it that Magic Mike is based on its star Channing Tatum’s own experience as a stripper.  Tatum was the same age then as Adam, the rookie stripper in this film; the eponymous Mike, played by Tatum, is Adam’s mentor both onstage, at a Tampa club called Xquisite, and offstage.  Tatum is much more dynamic when he’s gyrating on the Xquisite stage than he is an actor, in this movie anyway.  It’s possible he’s underplaying because the story, from a screenplay by Reid Carolin, draws on his autobiography – he thinks he can simply ‘be himself’ – but that doesn’t make him any less inexpressive.  Except for Matthew McConaughey, as the club manager and master of ceremonies, no one else registers either; the cast are in a no man’s land between documentary and drama and the effect is extremely dull.  McConaughey is nowadays getting praise as a character actor – in Killer Joe (which I’ve not seen), as well as in Magic Mike.   The histrionic energy of his playing is striking not because it amounts to good acting but because it’s unexpected.   (This new enthusiasm for a man previously dismissed as an uninteresting hunk provides Channing Tatum with the chance to see in Magic Mike his future as a film star as well as see his past recreated on screen.)   Alex Pettyfer is bland as Adam; most of the other strippers hardly register as individual bodies, let alone as characters.  There are only two female roles of any significance – Adam’s sister Brooke, with whom Mike has a relationship, and one of his other girlfriends.  Cody Horn and Olivia Munn are OK in these roles, which are essentially satellite roles.

Steven Soderbergh isn’t obviously judgmental about the lifestyle that he’s describing and he seems to like the characters (who are mostly pretty thick).  At the same time Soderbergh/Peter Andrews gives the neon lights in the streets of Tampa and the club itself a nasty, ominous aspect; and it seems to be crucial to the story that Mike believes there’s got to be something better than this.  The director’s even-handedness isn’t a bad thing in theory but it doesn’t help the stage routines, which are impersonal.  It probably wouldn’t be possible nowadays to make a mainstream Hollywood movie about a group of female strippers; it certainly wouldn’t be possible to show a male audience ogling undressed women on stage and enjoying themselves as the female parties in the Xquisite do.  I suppose this is gender-equality progress of a kind although, when one of the male strippers carries an enthusiastic but overweight woman out of the audience and pulls a back muscle in the process, you wonder how much progress has really been made.  I got bored by Magic Mike and left halfway through.

23 July 2012