Soderbergh panders to a nonexistent market.
Steven Soderbergh never seriously meant to retire. After announcing his planned farewell in 2009 — lamenting that Hollywood left few opportunities to go “narrow and deep” into subjects — he then made more movies faster than ever, including the Magic Mike male-stripper series starring Channing Tatum, which now supposedly concludes with Magic Mike’s Last Dance.
Soderbergh establishes Mike’s post-Covid predicament as a working-class white American male in gig-economy Florida, tired of prostituting himself in strip clubs but dragged back into what a colleague calls “sex work.” Picked up by an older, rich, divorced Latina, Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault), he relocates to London, where she finances his staging of a “female-empowerment” male strip show. It’s quasi prostitution, quasi showbiz — clearly a metaphor for Soderbergh’s own sense of self-exploitation. He turns it into a crash course on the anthropology of dance and theater aesthetics. No joke — and no enjoyable burlesque flourishes.
This obviously isn’t Soderbergh’s last dance. After all, he’s got a reputation as an unclassifiable innovator to live up to. Plus, industry connections. Yet, Last Dance epitomizes Hollywood’s current creative crisis. It is as unfocused and shallow as a movie can be.
Last Dance goes narrowly and cynically into post-indie, corporate Hollywood clichés. Soderbergh’s desperation shows a filmmaker who recycles a formula and, like a tired stripper lacking conviction, repeats the old motions. The idea that male strippers are somehow progressive or transgressive is so out of touch that it exposes Soderbergh’s commercial miscalculation. His cultural updates, such as making Maxandra a dissatisfied feminist-warrior with an adopted biracial daughter, come off as desperate pandering to a market that doesn’t exist. (Jemelia George plays the student intellectual whom Maxandra named after black and liberal-identified authoress Zadie Smith; she provides the film’s anthropological narration.)
Soderbergh’s lousy reboots of Ocean’s 11 were a fluke success, selling a poorly used brand-name cast. He condescended to Hollywood convention without improving it. Last Dance has the same problem. Soderbergh seems unaware that Tatum’s white-boy appropriation of hip-hop break-dancing moves is no longer a novelty. It was definitively mocked in the Wayans brothers’ satire Dance Flick (2009). Mike enlists an ethnically diverse chorus line of London break-dancers (also importing an Italian specialty act) for his new show, but this is essentially the same routine as in Magic Mike XXL, mixing the exotic and erotic to no appreciable effect. The choreography is unexceptional, a series of extended lap dances — continuing Mike’s initial seduction of Maxandra.
This pairing of mismatched sex objects sets up an unconvincing love story, but it doesn’t strike sparks; the script’s many loose ends defy what we know about human relations. What’s worse, Soderbergh betrays what he ought to know about movies.
All that Zadie Smith–style blather dismissing white patriarchal tradition, as Mike and Maxandra revamp the Rattigan Theater production of Isabel Ascendant, pointlessly insults Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan. But the film’s only hope is that Soderbergh will free Hayek from making angry, drunken feminist-of-color airs and bring back the memorable ecdysiast she unleashed in From Dusk Till Dawn.
I was hoping Soderbergh would justify his anti-Hollywood pretenses with a clever, post-feminist, post-hip-hop satire, anticipating an update of the 1949 Gene Kelly–Judy Garland backstage musical Summer Stock that would also send up Hollywood’s Millennial “feminist empowerment” pretenses. (The surprising comic deftness of Daniel Craig’s rousing redneck parody in Lucky Logan and Sonja Sohn’s provocative feminist parody in High Flying Bird were promising.) But Soderbergh lacks theatrical and movie-musical chops. Instead of showbiz illumination, we get Flashdance knockoffs, dimly photographed thanks to Soderbergh’s insistence on being his own cinematographer, “Peter Andrews.” Ever since his calling-card début, the nonerotic Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has aimed to be an original indie-movie eccentric, but Magic Mike’s Last Dance looks like a corporate sales-pitch dare he couldn’t refuse.
