Magic Mike (2012)

I was a good husband the other night and, in the safety of my own living room, sat down to watch "Magic Mike" with my wife. She'd had a long day. She needed a break. So why not watch the hunky, more-man-than-I'll-ever-be Alcide as a stripper? Ever dutiful, I sat next to her clutching a napkin to catch the drool that might fall from the corners of her mouth.

But something happened as we watched "Magic Mike." It wasn't really the movie I thought it was going to be. Yes, it was certainly racy. But while I squirmed a few times, I was never as uncomfortable as I expected to be. Nor was the film as funny as I thought it would be or as dramatically satisfying as I thought it would be. Some things did live up to my expectations - particularly how good Matthew McConaughey was and how bad Channing Tatum's acting still is despite his ability to fool people with what is clearly an awe-inspiring physique.

The sum of all of "Magic Mike"'s parts, then, seems to come down to one word: "interesting." Which means I didn't love it, but I definitely didn't hate it, either. It's a solid film that is clearly derivative of so many other movies thematically, and veers wildly between moments of balls-out (almost literally) entertainment and emotionally under-performing narrative.

Since the film is already out for home viewing, I probably don't need to elaborate much on the film's plot, which is the now-famous story about how Channing Tatum - while shooting a film for director Steven Soderbergh - shared with his director tales of his adventures pre-Hollywood as a young male stripper, leading to the epiphany of turning Tatum's past into a film. Tatum served as a creative consultant and producer for the film in addition to its star (and probably ghost co-writer), which means that he taught a handful of hunky hard bodies how to work it on the stage. I'm not sure how good of a teacher Tatum was, because his strip performances are so memorable and magnetic and Soderbergh gives so little screen time to any of his co-stars that it was hard to tell.

The emotional center of "Magic Mike" in my opinion is not the budding romance between Mike (Tatum) and a girl named Brooke (Cody Horn) who predictably turns up her nose at his line of work, but between Mike and her brother, Adam, played convincingly by Alex Pettyfer. Mike calls Adam "The Kid." The two meet on a construction site, Mike's day job to earn extra money and keep one foot near the door of his dream to design custom furniture. The Kid is unprepared on his first day, innocent and even a little obnoxious. It's hard to tell how there could possibly be any connection to Mike for him, but soon enough, Mike is helping to get Adam into a night club, then backstage. Adam promises to do whatever is asked of him to make a little extra money. He's just beginning to figure out what Mike really does for a living.

Mike becomes The Kid's big brother in virtually every way possible, even as he slowly starts to romance the disapproving Brooke. The Kid is thrown to the wolves - check that, the cougars - when Mike and his boss Dallas (the deliciously slimy and just-a-bit-too-old former stripper-turned-strip joint-owner played with zeal by McConaughey) shove him onstage to replace an ailing stripper, the song "Like a Virgin" pumping unironically through the sound system as he timidly removes his clothes "like an 8-year-old" to the nonetheless delighted young women sitting down front.

Of course The Kid gets too comfortable in his new-found lifestyle and accepts side work peddling ecstasy and other drugs for the nightclub's bouncer, Tobias (played by how-in-the-hell-did-he-get-in-this-movie Gabriel Iglesias, the rotund stand-up comic and former winner of "Last Comic Standing"). Before long, and probably more to impress his sister than to help a guy who we're not even sure is his real friend, Mike is bailing Adam out of just about every possible situation: puling him out of near-overdoses and spending thousands of dollars to bail him out of drug deal debts.

The remaining characters in "Magic Mike" are so thinly developed that they're almost invisible, merely abdominal window dressing for the film's best scenes, which I'm slightly embarrassed as a guy to say are definitely the nightclub/stripping scenes. Cable TV stars Matt Bomer ("White Collar") and Joe Manganiello ("True Blood") are riveting, hunky specimens given nothing to do when not flanking Tatum onstage during "It's Raining Men."

I wanted to know a little more about some of these other guys, and one of the disappointments for me with "Magic Mike" was that the film quite simply never set out to sell me what I wanted to buy. I suppose I was looking for a naughtier version of "The Full Monty," a film that had me caring much more about a larger number of men, none of them even close to the Adonis-like level of fitness of any of this film's stars. Those men, I cared for. These guys, not so much. I am jealous as hell of them, their bodies and their pull over women. But I wasn't made to care about them.

The under-use of some decent actors further exposes the limitations of Channing Tatum. Here's a guy who's had arguably the best year of anyone in Hollywood, and folks have been saying that this his is best performance yet. I am inclined to agree, but this immediate compliment carries with it a long-term caveat of negative consequences, because Tatum is not much of an actor. What he very clearly is is a performer. And as Alison Willmore of Movieline points out in her review of the film, there is a difference between the two.

You cannot understate just how magnetic Tatum is during those scenes when he's on stage stripping, his hip-hop-inspired grinds punctuated with an athleticism worthy of the men's U.S. gymnastics team. But Tatum is as good as I think he's going to get here because he's playing himself. Whenever he's asked to be dramatic and "act," he makes faces that suggest he's trying to pass a kidney stone without letting on. If he can make a career out of playing athletes and soldiers, I think his star will continue to shine brightly. But I'll have to see a performance to change my mind about the fact that this, right now, is his shining moment.

Matthew McConaughey, on the other hand, is as good as I hoped he'd be. His Dallas is a grimy trouser snake-charmer, a sweaty-yet-sexy middle-aged man, the apparent brother to Tom Cruise's Stacee Jaxx in "Rock of Ages," a film released within weeks of this one. Dallas' motivational speeches-dipped-in-protein powder give "Magic Mike" the film's only real humor, and McConaughey is the master of getting close to another man physically without the slightest betrayal of heterosexuality (not that there's anything wrong with that).

If the subject matter of "Magic Mike" seems very uncharacteristic of Soderbergh, the delivery is not. The film constantly employs hard cuts at odd and sometimes unsuspecting moments, at times even cutting conversations off as they are happening. There are moments of interesting, moody lighting. In fact, the lighting is one of the elements of the film that stood out for me: perfectly theatrical in the nightclub scenes and strangely washed and filtered - almost painterly - in some of the film's outdoor scenes. I wasn't sure what to make of the California glow Soderbergh conspicuously imposed on his Florida landscape, but at least it kept me interested.

When you strip "Magic Mike" down to its essentials (pun most certainly intended), you're left with a series of interesting contradictions.

You've got Channing Tatum, the unbelievable performer making women (and let's face it, many men) swoon with the rotation of his hips or a flash of his inhumanly hard ass battling Tatum the thespian-in-training no longer in the comfort zone of it-sucks-anyway Nicholas Sparks territory.

You have a movie that works best when it's the story of a friendship between two young men who want better for their lives but settle for what works vs. the more standard narrative of the cautionary tale of a dubious line of work, more brilliantly realized in films as recent as "The Wrestler."

You have an opportunity for pure sexual escapist fantasy for audiences dipped in a story with truly dark themes, causing moments of estrogen-spiking euphoria to be followed by head-scratching scenes where hottie Mike is trying too hard to win over a girl whose every facial expression mimics McKayla Moroney, the gymnast who's "unimpressed." Ladies, you will want to watch this movie with your hormone-balancing drug of choice in one hand and your mood-balancing drug of choice in the other.

"Magic Mike" loses a bit of its luster for me when it settles into the well-tread debate over whether or not a person is what he does for a living. Mike's sense of self-loathing is very real but has been handled much better in many other films. And the self-destructive path his younger protege is on provides tonal contrast to the wild excitement of the movie's performance scenes that could have been better balanced by a deeper connection between the two young men in the script.

In the end, I suspect that the only thing most people will remember about "Magic Mike" is the nightclub scenes. And rightfully so. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to humming a few bars of Ginuwine's "Pony" this morning while toweling off my back fat after a shower. There's certainly a place in this world for "Showgirls" with boys. But maybe I was just looking for a little bit more. Or maybe the inadequacy I felt while watching the film was not in its execution, but rather in myself and my own doughy physique as I sat there holding that throw pillow over my lap, my napkin ready to wipe my wife's mouth...

★ ★ 1/2