One of the greatest moments in movie history — and no, this is not hyperbole — is when Channing Tatum dances to Ginuwine's "Pony" in Magic Mike. It's the kind of scene you wish you could un-see, just so you can experience it for the first time again. The sequel falls short of delivering a number quite as spectacular, but it certainly isn't lacking. Like its predecessor, Magic Mike XXL will make you horny (let's not mince words) — because, like its predecessor, the movie understands that you deserve to be worshipped. It understands that the key to women's sexuality is foreplay. Magic Mike XXL is foreplay.
The story picks up three years after the original left off: Mike is now a struggling furniture designer; the strip club Dallas started in Miami has gone bust, and the strippers who went with him — Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken Doll (Matthew Bomer), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Tarzan (Kevin Nash) — are on a road trip. Mike decides to join them, having gotten a taste of his old life after Tarzan tricked him into meeting up by telling him Dallas died. (Dallas did not actually die, nor does he appear in the movie.) Their destination: a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach. Their mission: to reclaim their roots and be the male entertainers they were born to be.
The idea that the guys are "male entertainers" — more specifically, men who bring joy into the lives of women who need it — is the overarching point of the movie, which otherwise doesn't have much plot (no complaints here). When Richie has a crisis of confidence, for example, Mike urges him to go into a mini-mart and give a surprise strip tease to a curmudgeonly clerk girl. Make that woman smile, he tells Richie, because that's what you do. (Without spoiling too much, Richie dances to a '90s boy-band gem and his props include a bag of Cheetos.) Mike prefaced his pep talk with the backstory for how he came up with his "Pony" dance: He was at a party, he saw a girl being neglected by her boyfriend, and he thought of all the things he would do to that girl in need if given the chance. It was a bit of meta dialogue, really. Was Mike explaining the origin story for "Pony," or was Channing Tatum explaining the reason Magic Mike was such a box office success?
If I have any complaints about MMXXL, written by Reid Carolin (who also wrote the first movie) and directed by Greg Jacobs, it's that it was too bro-heavy in its first 30 minutes or so, playing essentially like a dude's road-trip fantasy. The guys took molly; they made what looked like protein shakes; they asked each other, "Did you bangy?" whenever one of them wanted to know if another had gotten laid.
It's obvious that Channing and company were trying to attract a male audience, which is a smart business decision, I guess. But I found myself at one point wishing Brooke, the Cody Horn character from the first movie, were around (she doesn't appear in the sequel) — which is saying a lot, given her insufferable nature. It wasn't her buzzkill personality I was missing, and I definitely didn't want XXL to be another story about a woman trying to fix a broken man. But without her character, or a stand-in for it, there was more talk in the first quarter of the movie about how the guys were put on this earth to please women than there was action.
That action finally came when the guys made a pit stop at a club called Domina, run by a woman named Rome (Mike's original Dallas), played by Jada Pinkett Smith, who is such a force in this movie you won't even remember that Matthew McConaughey guy. It's when Mike kisses Rome's hand, the start of him groveling for her forgiveness, that you first feel the spark that makes Mike (and Channing Tatum) the babeshow that he is: He's the perfect mix of sensitive man and confident man. Man who wants to please you and man who actually knows how.
The stripping helps. We get our first big numbers at Domina, where Rome refers to women as queens and demands that her employees, including performers played by tWitch, Michael Strahan, and Donald Glover, make her queens feel "worshipped" and "exalted" (words she later uses at the stripper convention finale). In one room, Strahan straddles a queen on a table and flips her over every which way; in another, tWitch makes queens scream by doing unspeakable things with his body; and in another, Glover serenades a recently divorced queen named Caroline, a woman Rome handpicked for the performance because she looked like she needed some love.
"We're like healers or something," Glover's character, Andre, later tells Ken. Inspired by those words, Ken goes on to sing "Heaven" to a woman whose husband has never once made love to her with the lights on. Ken doesn't strip. He doesn't gyrate. He just sings (and straddles). He's set out to touch this woman's heart — and, of course in doing so, he knows he'll rouse other parts of her body too.
I will not spoil the finale routines for you by telling you who dances to what, but suffice it to say that there is more than one classic '90s R&B song in the mix, meaning you will once again see Channing (and tWitch, who is really an eighth wonder) hump floors and faces to lyrics that promise mind-blowing pleasure ... all night long. (That's a hint.)
But you will see no actual sex in the movie. Compare that to Fifty Shades of Grey, the other title intended to turn you on this year. It had about 10,000 sex scenes, and yet MMXXL is a million times hotter. Fifty Shades is about a cold, distant man demanding pleasure on his terms; XXL is about kind, generous men whose express goal is to make women feel good on their terms. It's about men who have the sensitive soul of your dream husband and the sexual prowess of an animal (another song hint). And, yeah, it's also about great abs.
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