It definitely gives new meaning to bad taste. Sexy has never been this sexless, degrading to women and an insult to men. What is basically says is that if you're a woman, it's in order for men to humiliate you and prostitute themselves for your money. And if you're male, you only have your body to sell for company and that your soul means nothing.
This is soulless entertainment with bite. Still, it's going to be a winner at the box office, with women swooning over hunks pumped full of steroids, loaded with pelvic thrusts, pumping groins and suggestive phallic ambiguities. Surely there's more to entertainment than what is below the belt (or sadly missing).
When it comes to the art of stripping, re-watch the magnificent Gypsy and see how she became the world's most famous stripper by simply removing a glove or showing an ankle. Or The Full Monty, where the context is fun and the content loaded with meaning and social relevance.
It's also sad to see actors the calibre of Channing Tatum and Matt Bomer wasting their talents (and at times looking really embarrassed), and a director like Emmy Award winner Gregory Jacobs (Behind the Candelabra), camping it up with lots of drag queens, bromance bonding and boys with toys.
Says Jacobs: "I love these characters, and the possibility of following their story was something that really intrigued me, plus the aspect of Mike reclaiming his bond and his friendship with them, his realising that he missed them and that they missed him, too. I felt it would be great to get the band back together and make a road trip movie."
Picking up the story three years after Mike bowed out of the stripper life at the top of his game in Magic Mike, the sequel finds the remaining Kings of Tampa likewise ready to throw in the towel. But they want to do it their way: burning down the house in one last blow-out performance in Myrtle Beach, and with legendary headliner Magic Mike sharing the spotlight with them.
On the road to their final show at a stripper convention, with whistle stops in Jacksonville and Savannah to renew old acquaintances and make new friends, Mike and the guys learn some new moves and shake off the past in surprising ways.
Though purely fictional, some of the elements and atmosphere of Mike's world are inspired by Tatum's own experiences from his early days as a dancer, and not all of it could be contained in one telling.
"One of the things Channing originally brought up was his trip to a stripper convention back in the day," says screenwriter Reid Carolin, who, along with Nick Wechsler, Jacobs and Tatum, also returns as a producer on the sequel. "We tried to work it into the first movie, but it's such a big set piece that it was a story unto itself."
Long-time producing team Tatum and Carolin, who have lived with some of these ideas germinating for years, long before the first film was even conceived, would concur. "Greg was so focused and yet so open to us as creative partners from the very beginning," says Tatum. "There were countless hours spent turning over ideas and bringing this thing together. He completely understood that what would keep this story going was these guys, these characters we created but had really only scratched the surface of who they were."
The filmmakers also amped up the volume with new characters that introduce unexpected challenges and directions. Amber Heard is the elusive Zoe, a photographer who catches Mike's eye; Andie MacDowell is Nancy, an uninhibited Southern Belle (and lustful cougar) who might have something BDR had given up hope of ever finding; and Jada Pinkett Smith is completely out of her league as Rome, the impresario of a one-of-a-kind exotic entertainment palace, which takes Mike and the guys down a rabbit hole of possibilities that are nothing short of inspiring and brings a fresh focus to their performances.
For Tatum, the core of the film is "about guys, doing guy stuff, and trying to figure out what women want. This time, you get into them a little more as people and understand who they are. Yeah, they're all a little crazy. They're just trying to get on with life and have a blast, and a lot of it is hilarious and ridiculous, but that's how a lot of friendships are. They're going out on this one last night and you know it will end with everybody on stage in thongs", he continues. "These guys like walking on the edge and knowing it's there, but they all love each other and no one will let any of the others completely fall off, and you end up loving them for that."
"I hope audiences will feel as if they went on a ride with these guys, and that it was a fun, funny and wild road trip with good friends," Jacobs concludes. "Most of all, I hope they find it as joyous an experience to watch it as we did to make it."
