Though Steven Soderbergh made his bones directing serious dramas like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Erin Brockovich, lately his career has taken a strange turn where he’s begun making movies about unique professions, starring non-actors whose real-life skills make them suited for believably performing said professions on film. He made The Girlfriend Experience, a film about a prostitute starring a porn star, Haywire, a film about a professional killer starring a professional fighter, and now comes Magic Mike, a film about male strippers starring former stripper Channing Tatum. In content and presentation, Magic Mike feels fairly similar to Soderbergh’s other two movies about weird professions, but it has a leg up over those other two films in one respect: Channing Tatum actually has experience doing legitimate acting.
Tatum is charming in the title role, he pulls off his dramatic scenes, and his real-life experience in the world of stripping definitely paid off during the dancing sequences. And even Alex Pettyfer, who I’ve found to be wooden in other things, is acceptable in the role of the new recruit, The Kid. But, if there’s any reason to see Magic Mike, that reason is Matthew McConaughey’s performance as Dallas, the club owner and veteran performer. Mind you, this isn’t like The Lincoln Lawyer, where McConaughey is earning praise for stepping out of his persona and actually doing some serious dramatic stuff. No, this is the most cocky, shirtless, bongo-playing McConaughey that’s ever appeared on film. He’s honed his obnoxious McConaughey persona into a sniper’s bullet, and he’s sending it right to your head. Alright, alright, alright!
Which brings us to the actual stripping. The gyrating men in G-strings were the selling point of the film—I get that—but it still felt like there was a bit too much of it. Around the seventh or eight strip routine, it’s kind of like, “I get it, they’re strippers. Can we get back to the character stuff?” There may be something of a double standard here, as I don’t think a movie about female strippers could have contained so many dance numbers and not been dismissed as complete schlock (then again, women have boobies, so the same number of stripping scenes would have involved far more “nudity”). The wallowing in sleaze is disappointing, because Reid Carolin’s script is at least serviceable, and Soderbergh’s talents make the movie far prettier to watch than you might imagine; but you never get the sense that the director is fully committing himself to telling a real story. All the stuff about striving to make it in the world and developing new romances feels like a formality—the excuse for making a movie about strippers. Soderbergh’s touch makes it all effective enough, but it feels like a waste for someone of his pedigree to keep making these weird projects that seem to be more interested in exploring a profession or a performer’s physical skills than they are in telling a story.
