Magic Mike is a film about Mike (Channing Tatum), a male stripper, and entrepreneur who takes a new younger stripper under his wing and teaches him the ropes. They have adventures that take them through waking up in vomit and meeting hot women with whom they take drugs with and sleep with. Mike wants to start a small business making furniture but the banks won’t lend to him because he had bad credit and a $13,000 stack of ones and fives. We are to assume these are his tips from stripping. Mike goes through a transformation in the course of the movie. Along the way, in between very predictable drama, there is actual stripping. We don’t see any penises but there are butts in thongs galore to keep the drunk women and gay men (I’m not saying all gay men will like the stripping), who go for that sort of thing, stimulated.
I was surprised that almost half this movie was not stripping. The commercials promoted it as a raunchy comedy for people who enjoy male stripping. My wife had planned to go see it with her girl friends but when they never went, I offered to take her since she seemed eager to check it out. It does have a dark story with bubble gum ending that at times is reminiscent of Saturday Night Fever. The characters are all flat and undeveloped and the stripping scenes are no more racy than what you’d see on a CSI episode.
In conclusion, I liked the way the producer and director attempted to give this film a story instead of just showing stripping for 2 hours. Unfortunately the story they gave us is unbelievable, slow, and most of all uninteresting. For that reason, I think this movie has very few people it will appeal to. It just wasn’t funny enough. By sheer demographics, it may not even break even on its budget. If it does do well, I’ll strip on Youtube for you. Here’s hoping it doesn’t!
