A slow road-trip-dance-competition-brothel film.

Rating: 3/10 (30 June 2015)

Mike is persuaded by his past twerking buddies to take a road trip to a stripper's convention. He has been out of the game for three years now. They have an accident and meet up with Mike's ex.
Yeah, that sounds about right. There's a whole lot of talking about a whole bunch of nothing. And even if I may not be the intended target audience, it really took like forty minutes before the film even gets to the goods. Those boys don't dance around for a good while and still then, the best dancing doesn't even come from the mates on the road trip. Channing Tatum can move but the other guys are dead weight.
Gregory Jacobs was the first assistant director on the first "Magic Mike". He has, however, been the first AD on a few of Steven Soderbergh's films. Now they decide to both produce a sequel where Jacobs can take the director's chair and Soderbergh will make some real poor decisions with lighting, composition and editing. The film is so badly lit that so much of it is in darkness. And when it is lit then it's odd. Highlighting weird features. Felt like a student film.
The characters are hardly admirable characters, perhaps they're not meant to be. But then they sit around and talk about the difficulties of being so beautiful, how it holds them back and how connections are so difficult. It's a little juvenile, self indulgent and boring. Then the film tries reaching for that two-hour mark to really test the idea of patience. But the characters: you have the tall Greek god type with the monster junk that no woman can handle. Then there's the aged guy who looks like a run down version of Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler". He cant act and is bile-bubbling watching him strip down to a tiny G-string. This ken doll retard that actually just comes off a little weak and whiny. And the Latino guy because that shows diversity. Apparently.
The obstacles? They each have to come to terms with being ripped and beautiful (except the wrestler, he needs to come to terms with being really old). Other than that I don't really see any obstacles.
Okay, for the good stuff. There are two-dance scenes that are really impressive. The choreography is impeccable. The first is in a secret strip club where Mike is challenged and laps up flipping and twisting women around as he bangs them, rhythmically. And the last dance where Mike and a new guy pull of an impressive reflective dance routine with two women on chairs. Channing Tatum won't come off looking unskilled in this little drama. Jada Pinkett Smith is quite sassy as the stripping MC. And the soundtrack is pretty great. Other than that
I want to say that this one is really for the ladies but I feel the ladies might even be disappointed with the amount of fun to be had in a film that appears to have been more fun to make. There's ten minutes of worthy entertainment but another hundred and five minutes that you have to sift through. "Magic Mike XXL" is a weird mash up of a road-trip-dance- comp-brothel film that's just boring.
Ill give it some points for the dancing sequences.
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