Magic Mike XXL (2015)

Magic Mike XXL arrives three years after its predecessor and promptly trades most of that film's grime for something looser and sunnier: a road trip through the American South in a frozen yogurt van, punctuated by impromptu routines and a great deal of male flesh presented for public consumption. Gregory Jacobs directs with the easy confidence of a man who knows exactly which audience he is serving. The camera lingers on torsos the way other films linger on landscapes. The reversal is total. Here the men are the scenery, and the women do the looking.

The ensemble is more varied than a 2015 studio comedy had any obligation to be. Jada Pinkett Smith's Rome, a Savannah club owner with a history with Mike, was written for a man and simply cast otherwise, which is the cleanest kind of adjustment because it requires no explanation. Donald Glover, Adam Rodriguez, Gabriel Iglesias and Stephen Boss fill out the margins with warmth. Race is never the subject. The cast is diverse the way a real room is diverse. The film also pauses for an amateur drag contest that Mike enters with sincerity, and the revues carry a steady undercurrent of homoerotic staging. None of it is argued for. It is simply there, which is its own quiet achievement.

The Nancy mansion sequence is the most interesting detour, a long, generous scene in which middle-aged women are treated as desirable and worth performing for. A faint note about consent and pleasure hums beneath the choreography, never rising to a sermon. Mike's faltering furniture business supplies a whiff of economic precarity, though the film has no interest in pressing the point. The result is a sequel that coasts on charm, offers little in the way of argument, and remains stubbornly pleasant company. Classification: a hangout picture with a conscience it declines to lecture about, which is a rarer vintage than the shelf usually stocks.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}