Magic Mike ☆☆☆☆

So, yeah. I went to see a film about male strippers, can you honestly blame me?

Here is a brief outline of the plot for those under the impression it is just a film about men stripping.

Mike is a thirty year old stripper/entrepreneur. He has businesses in detailing cars (adding snazzy extras), roofing, and making custom furniture. He is also one of the biggest attractions at a strip club in Tampa, Florida. Known for his amazing dance skills and Fine assets (it needed the capital F, believe me) he earns decent money, sleeps with a plethora of beautiful women, and generally looks to be living the high life.

But Mike isn’t really happy. Enter Adam and Brooke.

Adam is 19, living on his sister’s couch, and finding work using Craigs List (for UK readers it’s like the Gumtree website) by lying about his skill set. He meets Mike at a construction site where he has said he can roof buildings, which of course is a lie. With one thing and another (I’m not going to spoil the details) Adam ends up seeing Mike again outside a nightclub where Mike decides to help the kid out, throwing him in to the world of stripping when ‘Tarzan’ is too incapacitated to perform, whereupon The Kid makes his debut to Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Both cringe-y and hilarious.

The story continues with Adam becoming intoxicated by his new life as a stripper, while Mike becomes less contented with his lifestyle and more interested in Adam’s sister Brooke. I won’t ruin the plot here, but at the end of the review I’ll add a spoiler warning and a brief look on the major plot points and ending.

The film was nothing like I would have expected. In fact, I’m not really sure what I expected apart from a lot of half naked men and the odd bum cheek. I had assumed there would be more laughs, moving more toward the comedy route than drama, but I was totally wrong. It made a perfect drama, even bordering on the tragic.

Of course there is comedy. From the performances by the strippers to the dialogue between characters there are some very funny moments. Like I said though, it did well to err on the side of the tragic. This perspective was reminiscent of Showgirls which looked at dancing girls in Las Vegas, although Magic Mike did not delve quite so deeply into the seedy underbelly of the business of sex.

The casting was superb. Of course Channing Tatum as Mike was perfect as Mr Tatum used to be a stripper, previously showing off his dance skills in earlier films such as Step Up (where he met his wife, a lucky lucky lucky woman). However it was not just his biceps or his quick feet that were of interest about his performance in this film, Channing seemed to dig deep to really bring out a wonderful, charming, level headed guy and twist him with raw emotions about his situation and his life. Such emotions which are brought out by Brooke, played by Cody Horn, a relatively new actress with a few episodes of Rescue Me and the US Office that people from the UK might recognise her from.

At first I thought they had made a huge mistake in casting when Brooke first comes on screen, then you realise it is actually genius. Horn at first seems to hold no acting talent, being slightly wooden in her responses to Tatum, but as the film progresses and the style becomes more solid, she holds her own against the bank of talent. The acting and dialogue in this film felt like it was improvised, hardly any script involved, because the conversations were slightly stilted sometimes or the flirting was just a bit clumsy. It was very real to watch, and incredibly refreshing.

Adam, aka The Kid, is played by the gorgeous Alex Pettyfer, a Brit who played mini-spy Alex Rider in Stormbreaker and more recently an alien in I am Number Four, both movies which should have spawned sequels but lacked the box office pull. Pettyfer is very good in this film, totally buff and, dare I say, sexy as The Kid, but also a total fuck-up (excuse my language) as Adam. He allows himself to be sucked into the glory of being a star stripper, taking risks and destroying hopes and dreams of others along the way. Pettyfer is truly growing up now and I hope this performance will make the Studio bosses at Lionsgate think “I know who should play Finnick in the next Hunger Games movie”. Apologies to those who have no idea what I’m talking about, just to be clear, Pettyfer would be PERFECT as Finnick Odair and I’ll happily have an argument with anyone who disagrees.

The rest of the cast are mainly made up of the strippers where Magic Mike and The Kid work. For those who watch a lot of US television they will recognise at least three of the supporting strippers: Joe Manganiello who plays Alcide the werewolf in True Blood, Adam Rodriguez who played Eric Delko in recently cancelled CSI: Miami, and Matt Bomer who stars in White Collar. There is also a WWE wrestler called Kevin Nash who plays 'Tarzan' - wrestling fans would know him as Diesel. 

Of course the main man in this strip club (apart from Mike) is played by the most famous abs in Hollywood…ahem I mean Matthew McConaughey. I know McConaughey takes a lot of heat for being a somewhat rubbish actor but he seemed to have been designed for this role. A cocky, gorgeous stripper who now owns and runs his own business, looking to expand to Miami and carry on his lifestyle with no real heed to the wants and wishes of his boys. There is a ruthless streak running through McConaughey's performance and this is why I don’t criticise his acting too much, because if he wants to he can do it. Ok so he can’t do any other accents but why should he? If Ray Winstone had abs like McConaughey's he wouldn’t be forced to become a cockney American/Russian/posh English gentleman all the time, he could just be Cockney.

There is quite a lot of stripping action, which was fine by me (and the rest of the audience, mostly female). It wasn’t gratuitous though like the filmmakers had thought “ummm bit stuck for plot, lets have another show!” The stripping scenes served a wider purpose to show the enjoyment that the guys got from performing, the skill level of Channing when it comes to dancing, and how the lure of all that cash must be so hard to pull yourself away from. I was glad to see the stripping wasn’t perfect either, yes Channing was awesome, but the other guys were not quite so nimble, though equally impressive in the muscle department. This made it more realistic once again, that you weren’t just watching some over-rehearsed backing dancers who took an acting gig.

I mentioned previously that the style was something that had to take shape for the audience to become more comfortable with the acting. The film uses a method adopted by Sam Mendes in Away We Go, Jason Reitman in Juno, and perhaps most famously by Tarantino, which is the usage of chapters. 

Away We Go is separated by destinations, Juno by seasons, Tarantino by whatever takes his fancy, and here Soderbergh adopts it using calendar months. The film goes from June to August and each month is announced quite abruptly by a black screen with white lettering announcing the month. This surprised quite a few people in the audience who you could hear saying “what was that?” I personally saw the first month announcement and felt almost a sense of relief, I knew which angle this film would take, it wouldn’t be some stupid comedy about strippers it was going to have real depth and feeling. I could have been totally wrong of course but luckily for my own ego I was right.

I really genuinely enjoyed this film. Yes there are a lot of half naked men and I am not sure how many of the straight male population (or gay female) would appreciate those moments, however the drama and the tragedy make this film so much more than a bunch of guys stripping. It is realistic in the sense you can imagine a conversation flowing the way it does on screen, the emotions are played out right with no clarity given as to how this all might end. It surprised me quite how serious the story became, then it delighted me with cheeky banter between the characters.

There were also, in case I forgot to mention, a lot of half naked guys…and a few bum-cheeks. Bliss.

*******************SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER ****************

So just a quick, spoiler filled, take on the film.

I loved Mike, he was so strong but obviously needed someone like Brooke to not be adoring his body only, wanting to talk to someone and be something other than ‘Magic Mike’, which really was all he was to Adam.

Adam was such a little shit I found myself adoring his physical presence but HATING him for ruining Mike. At the beginning when he refused drugs from the other strippers you thought ‘yay sensible kid’, then he gets wasted and moves on to the harder pills, then taking them to sell. Such an IDIOT. Costing Mike his life savings and then being so blaze about the enormity of paying him back made me utterly dislike him, because he never learnt his lesson.

I wish the relationship between the brother and sister had been explored a little more, as the beginning was such a nice touch with Brooke making Adam do impressions. However I realise it was a two hour film and really did not need to be any longer than that.

I very much enjoyed the end, with Mike leaving the strip club to do god knows what with his life, Adam stepping up to fill his shoes as he really does fit the role better, having no other wants or cares other than women, drugs, and stripping. What I especially liked though, was that Mike went to Brooke and finally got the girl he wanted and deserved. It was a really cheeky ending too, I had such fear as the film became more twisty and tragic that it would end in death or something equally horrific, but it didn’t. It ended with banter, discussion of breakfast, and a kiss. Perfect.