Home Reviews Review: Magic Mike XXL

Review: Magic Mike XXL

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I quite enjoyed the first Magic Mike film and was excited to see this one. However, I was really disappointed. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly going to see this movie for its over complicated story line, I knew it was stripping and topless men. But when you think of a sequel, you tend to think that it picks up after the first film. Well, it does, but within 10 minutes it manages to throw out every single thing that happened in the first movie. Take, for example, in the end of the first movie Mike (Channing Tatum) has himself some arm candy, a son and the business he has always wanted to run. Ten minutes into the movie there is a one liner that says something akin to “Oh yeah, she left and took my son!” – That is literally it! He also doesn’t seem to care about the outcome of what happens. The way this was done was incredibly careless.

The premise for the movie is that three years after Mike has abandoned stripper life in peak form, he and the other Kings of Tampa hit the road to Myrtle Beach so they can put on one last amazing performance. We quickly move onto the traveling part of the film, which basically consists of a 2 hour car journey that doesn’t actually offer anything of value to the story. Literally nothing of importance happens and, to really top it off, there is barely any dancing or stripping. The small amount that is in this movie is rather tame and very lacklustre, unlike the first movie (so much for XXL). Every dance scene after the first and last ten minutes just seems randomly placed and doesn’t make sense in the scene, as well as looking just wrong.
It basically took them 2 hours to drive to a male entertainment convention, which in real life is fine, but in a movie it is far too long. The journey doesn’t even have a smooth course pace-wise. It seems more like a random bunch of ideas thrown in to fill the movie up while ultimately serving no extra purpose to the final scene.
Another issue that really bugged me is that they were really trying to cash in on gay men going to see this movie and it was extremely obvious. They went as far as making the characters dance in a gay fashion for ten odd minutes in a drag bar. It looked so out of character and, again, really badly forced. My only guess for this choice is the fact that a lot of gay men liked the first movie for all the topless men and dance routines. But if you’re going to tone all that down and remove a lot of what made gay men want to see the movie in the first place, then that quite literally makes a mockery of gay men dancing. I would never usually take offence, but this time around it was just so forced and thrown in out of desperation to make money that I couldn’t ignore it.
magic_mike_xxl_trailer_screengrab_h_2015The reason I feel I am justified in all the above opinions is the fact that the editing quality was horrendous for a professional movie. It had a particularly stupid scene where the camera was focused on a woman’s reaction for literally ten seconds while a lap dance was being preformed and it felt so weird and odd. You were sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I looking at this woman’s face? Get back to the movie and whats actually going on!’. This happened quite a few times. It felt like they recorded a scene and later realised it looked bad and then decided to extend the previous shot to cover it up.
The only thing that was quite enjoyable for me was the faces. You just sit there and watch the faces of many hot guys going about their business. But after two hours, that novelty wears off. By the end, I felt that Jada Pinkett Smith was the best character in the film, and she didn’t even do that much! She had more personality and character development than everyone else combined. It’s fairly depressing to go and see a movie that you know is going to be a bit of mindless fun, only to realise half way through that it’s way worse than you could’ve imagined. This movie was only made to grab a bit more money for the company and you can clearly see this throughout, including in the shoddy editing, which says it all really. 
The only positive thing I have to say about it is the first ten minutes with the first dance. That was a pretty cool scene and got me excited. I thought the movie was going to be great! There were also some new and, quite frankly, deadly dance moves implemented by using the environment around the dancer but, unfortunately, it wasn’t a good movie. In fact, it was terrible.

Just wait until it ends up on Netflix and then skip to the good parts. 3/10


Have you seen Magic Mike XXL? Do you agree with me? Let me know in the comments!

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