112 min | R | February 10, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Mike Lane is broke and bartending in Miami when a wealthy divorcee hires him to put on a show in London. He says yes. The franchise that started in a Tampa strip club ends as a stage musical about a woman’s midlife reinvention, which is a strange place to land.
Mike Lane is out of money and out of the furniture business. He tends bar at a charity event where Maxandra Mendoza, a socialite in the middle of a brutal divorce, pays him for a private dance. She decides he should direct a stage show in a theater she controls. Steven Soderbergh and Reid Carolin frame the finale not as a story about male strippers but as a story about a rich woman seizing back her own theater and her own life. Mike becomes a supporting character in his own series.
Channing Tatum plays Mike with the loose, unforced ease that has always been his best register. He sells the early dance with Maxandra as seduction and apology at once. Salma Hayek Pinault plays Maxandra as imperious and impulsive, a woman who buys her way into a project to spite an ex-husband. The chemistry works in private and evaporates the moment the script pushes them into a conventional romance. Jemelia George plays Maxandra’s daughter Zadie, who narrates the film with arch observations about desire that the movie itself never earns.
Soderbergh shoots and edits the film himself under his usual pseudonyms. He stages the dance sequences with the clean, geometric coverage that made the first film electric, and a rain-soaked duet on the theater stage is the one passage that recovers the old voltage. The problem is everything between the dances. Carolin’s script strands Tatum in a London rehearsal-room plot about prudish theater bureaucrats and a stuffy ex-husband. The ensemble of dancers from the previous films is gone, and Soderbergh fills the gap with a troupe of strangers the camera never bothers to introduce.
The result is a finale that mistakes a change of scenery for a fresh idea. The earlier films were about labor, friendship, and bodies as merchandise. This one is about a woman’s self-actualization, and it routes that story through a man who exists mainly to enable it. Tatum and a few well-built numbers keep it watchable. Strip away the choreography and there is a thin contrivance standing where a story should be.