The distance between the movie sold by a trailer and the one you end up seeing is often as wide as that between the appetizing burger in the fast-food ad and the heat-lamped puck of sadness delivered to your tray. But in the case of Steven Soderbergh’s latest, that expectation mismatch works in reverse: The advertising might make this look like a flimsy excuse to put a bunch of hunky guys onscreen in equally flimsy thongs, but Magic Mike turns out to be more complicated than its slick, vapid rom-com trailers would indicate.
That might worry anyone who was sold on the idea of a big, dumb parade of sharply sculpted eye candy — a summer blockbuster without the usual spandex obscuring all the carefully toned abs and pecs. Never fear: If you came for a feast of flesh, you’ll get more than your money’s worth — within the first few minutes, even.
But Soderbergh is a filmmaker who keeps one foot firmly planted on each side of the art-vs.-entertainment divide. He can turn on a dime from the perfect pop moviemaking of Ocean’s 11 to the self-conscious experimentation of Bubble, and it appears that this latter portion of his career — he’s said he’ll be retiring soon — is devoted to blending those two inclinations. So much as with Haywire earlier this year, Magic Mike finds the director pulling at the threads of genre conventions to see what’s revealed in the unraveling.
Channing Tatum plays the titular Mike, a charismatic, entrepreneurial 30-year-old with a roofing business, a car-detailing business and dreams of a custom-furniture business. He also spends his weekend nights performing in an all-male dance revue that caters to sorority girls, bachelorette parties and bored housewives, run by an owner (Matthew McConaughey, channeling a subtle, sometimes frightening darkness) so dripping with sleaze that if he was still dancing himself, he probably wouldn’t even need to oil his body down.
Mike takes Adam — a shy young screw-up he meets at a construction job — under his wing, shaping him into a dancer in his own image, much to the consternation of always frustratingly out of reach.