Let me preface this piece by stating that this is not a review of Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to the Steven Soderbergh 2012 sleeper hit Magic Mike. Instead, this is a tribute to one of 2015's most surprisingly subversive and empowering films and, as such, it is riven with spoilers.
Oily, shiny, muscular spoilers.
The paper-thin plot is this. Our hero Mike is stuck in Florida with a struggling furniture business and, learning that his former stripping buddies are going for one last hurrah at a national convention in South Carolina, joins them in an artisan frozen yogurt truck – don’t ask, there’s no point – for the ride of a lifetime, so to speak. We presume that he needs the money, but this is never explicitly mentioned or explored: debilitating business debt is extremely unsexy.
Unlike the previous film, there is no agonising over the (very real) travails of stripping, regardless of gender: the drugs; the casual sexual encounters; the patchy income; the lack of respect; all those liability forms that have to be filled out when lubricated hands slip and a woman is dropped on her head mid-toss and cracks her septum. Instead, Magic Mike XXL is pure, joyful fantasy.
While everything that can go wrong does go wrong – they crash the yogurt truck after taking MDMA, temporarily rendering their MC incapacitated and leaving them without a whimsical mode of transportation – all the bumps on the road are smoothed over with effortless ease, because conflict is not happily paired with baby-oiled bodies undulating aggressively on a stage like sexy, tie-wearing sea anemones.
Indeed, the only real problem in the film is that Joe Manganiello's character, Big Dick Richie, has a penis that is far too large for an easily intimidated woman to have sex with, and this knocks his confidence. This problem is largely solved by dancing in a convenience store to the Backstreet Boys' I Want it that Way and making the clerk smile at his inventive ejaculatory choreography, achieved with a few thrusts and a quick squeeze of an open bottle of water. See? Fantasy.
But for the mild penis-anxiety blip, Magic Mike XXL is all about the women. Namely, how important and how vital it is to please women sexually, and how the ways women derive that pleasure come in more than 50 shades. There is no hierarchy. Women are serenaded and seduced, gamely chucked into sex swings after mock marriage ceremonies, tossed around massage tables like human salad spinners, stacked like building blocks and roundly ground upon for their own gratification. Every woman is different and every fantasy, no matter how leftfield or multifaceted, is fleshed out under the following guideline: Women are queens, so give them what they want.
And the female characters in the films are indeed queens because for the most part they are in control, confident and assertive. Of course they are: they hold the dollar bills, therefore they hold the power. There's a lingering smell of whitewashed sorority girl, but for the most part the women of Magic Mike XXL are unusually well-represented – all races, all ages and, perhaps most unusually for a major film, all BMIs. Every girl just wants (and deserves) to have fun.
Black female desire, which is woefully underrepresented in every facet of public life, let alone film, gets a fair showing when we arrive at the Georgian mansion of the new MC Rome (played by Jada Pinkett Smith). The audience is made up almost exclusively of black women, the boss is a black woman, the strippers – sorry, I mean male entertainers – are all black. Mike and his buddies step to the side in order to better watch and absorb their moves. In any other film, there would be a thrust-off between the two warring factions. Instead, Mike does a bit of a dance on a chair only after an extended goading, they all appreciate each other’s skill and laugh merrily while enjoying a cold brewski together after the show. It’s what the ladies would have wanted.
But back to the women, who are not only the focus of the film, but also those who save the day. In fact, those day-saving women – the business-minded and empathetic Rome, Andie MacDowell's modern-day rich benefactress, and Elizabeth Banks as Paris, the convention co-ordinator who bends only to Rome's will – are all well over 40. In the world of Magic Mike, the age of a woman is irrelevant. But in the real world, a film that highlights the obvious agency, sexuality and potency of women long considered irrelevant by the Hollywood machine must be pointed out.
There's no way to spin what is essentially a road trip/buddy movie into a paean to feminism, unless you go into the cinema with headphones in and a Gloria Steinem audiobook cued up to start as the first sinuous strains of Ginuwine's Pony oozes from the surround-sound speakers. But it is a film almost totally devoid of misogyny, which, depressingly, may have something to do with its relative unpopularity at the box office.
Women, watch it without guilt, and catch it before it gets shoved into a smaller screen.
