With Magic Mike’s Last Dance on streaming, it’s easy to watch its one good scene

polygon.com:

Compared to 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance,was a box-office whiff. The third Magic Mike movie is intended as the final installment in a trilogy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper with a heart of gold, a side business in carpentry, and a thoroughly explored philosophy about women’s pleasure. But unlike the previous Magic Mike movies, it never built a fandom or became a center of online discussion.

Blame the eight-year gap between the last film and this one. Blame the struggle to get people to watch movies in theatrical release. Or more accurately, just blame the endless problems with the movie itself. But for whatever reason, the film barely made a ripple when it hit theaters in February 2023.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is now streaming on Max, the platform it was originally made for. Like any film hitting streaming, it now has a new chance at finding an audience. But the Max release isn’t likely to move the needle much, given what a dispiriting, calculated, half-assed project it is. Frankly, there’s only one scene in Magic Mike’s Last Dance that’s really worth watching, at least for fans of the previous movies, and it comes early in the film.

For streaming subscribers (and impatient digital renters), the sequence starts about eight minutes in, as Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, is called to meet with his employer of the moment, a rich, bored woman named Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). COVID pulled Mike’s carpentry business under, and he’s doing odd jobs, like bartending for the catering company Maxandra hires for her latest fundraising gig. Depressed over her impending divorce, Maxandra heard from one of Mike’s exes that he does a “silly dance” that might cheer her up. She’s