It pains me that when I watched Magic Mike (2012) I was apparently feeling too classy* to admit watching it by doing a review and thus let it lie as a off-record film. I think if I'd reviewed MM1 I might have waxed lyrical about the all-American boy with the heart of gold, struggling to make a go of his furniture-making business and thus needing to shake his thang as a side hustle to make ends meet and get the sweet girl. With a lot of pretty hot male stripper action breaking up the heartwarming story. That's what I had in mind going into MMXXL.
So this movie is a hot mess in a not good way. I've read more coherent fan fiction and I don't even read fan fiction. What I mean is that I imagine more coherent fan fiction exists. Probably more coherent Magic Mike fan fiction.
I'll be honest here, I wasn't watching the first one for the story, that was quite a charming bonus. But this one doesn't try to have a story and it's not that crash hot in the strippers department either. It rations out the main characters' dancing pretty much until the very end, and then it's underwhelming.
It's basically a weird roadtrip that starts in a fro-yo van headed to the big stripper convention. Along the way the strippers get high, hang out at the beach, meet some girls, revisit old flames, spend some time trying to work out what's going down in the Boydello... an unusual mansion populated with women full of dollar bills and male strippers in every room on high rotation. Then, perhaps most intriguingly, they buckle up for a bit of a ride with Andie MacDowell, before finally arriving at the big stripper convention. Here we're left wondering if age has wearied them, or if they're just now too posh to push because their routines not a shade on MM1. And this is all they give us.
J* gives it 2 stars.
PS. I think this is the first movie this year where I wanted to half star and ended up rounding down rather than up.
*This is a very unusual situation because I rarely have illusions of class, so maybe I was drunk.
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j* Movie Reviews 2019
HumorSpoilery recounts? Hilarious reviews? Serious takes? Just want to know what one female film reviewer who likes action thinks about the latest release? My collection of reviews from the releases of 2019.
