Channing Tatum in Magic Mike
The background
Fresh from martial arts mayhem in Haywire, director Steven Soderbergh explores the world of male strippers in new film Magic Mike. Starring Channing Tatum, the film charts the relationship between an established male stripper and the young newcomer (Alex Pettyfer) he takes under his wing. Cue nudity and raunchy dancing – but does the film have anything more to offer?
Magic Mike works beautifully
Magic Mike could have been a disaster, but the movie works beautifully, wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Casting a mainstream actor like Channing Tatum in the lead role was a gamble – and it worked: “What could have been an embarrassing misfire hinted at by the movie’s misleading trailers is instead a smoothly distilled collaboration that balances Mr. Tatum’s heat and charm — and ambitions that are as transparent as Mike’s — with Mr. Soderbergh’s cool, cinematic intelligence and ongoing preoccupations,” Dargis said. The real pleasure of the film lies in “the beauty of bodies in motion and the deep cinematic joys of watching good-looking people perform extraordinary physical feats.”
The movie lacks muscle
“It’s a well-handled, engaging, lightweight picture,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The issue is that the film lack emotional weight: “Magic Mike somehow looks like a much darker and more challenging movie than is actually the case.”
A ‘simplistic cautionary fable’
Magic Mike starts off as “raunchy fun”, said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone, but “slowly degenerates into a simplistic cautionary fable” – disappointing from a “sharp observer” like Soderbergh. “The film develops a virtuous squint that starts tsk-tsking everything that was first shown as a fleshy amusement park,” Travers complained.
Great dance moves, but that’s about it
“Soderbergh relishes the film’s hot dog moments and has made sure that the onstage part of “Magic Mike” is characterized by energy and flash,” wrote Kenneth Turan in The Los Angeles Times. But the script is “clunk”, the supporting characters “thinly drawn”, and “the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising”.
Watch the Magic Mike trailer below.
