Magic Mike’s Last Dance

The man with the magic pelvis jets off to London with Salma Hayek for one final, uneven installment of Steven Soderbergh’s celebrated stripper franchise. To strip, perchance to dream; such were the humble hopes of Channing Tatum’s “Magic” Mike Lane when this all began. And what the first film delivered back in 2012 was a kind of movie magic: a scrappy, scampish novelty about Florida men who take their pants off for a living, delivered with loose-limbed auteur style by Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh departed for its brightly chaotic 2015 followup, and so did much of the urgency. Now both he and Tatum have returned — minus most other first-run cast members, beyond one brief Zoom interlude — for Last Dance (in theaters this Friday), an oddly inward and unhurried swan song that still shows flashes of the original’s pelvis-forward bedazzlement.

At 40, Mike is no longer dancing for money, though he still has the face of a handsome Easter Island statue and abdominals etched in glass. To pay the bills his custom furniture business doesn’t make enough to cover, he now does things like bartend benefits at the waterfront mansions of Miami’s one percent, which is how he meets the extravagantly named Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), recently separated from her media-mogul husband and desperate to feel like a woman again.

Genres:Comedy, Drama

Director:Steven Soderbergh

Cast:Salma Hayek, Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello