Just as everyone remembers Saturday Night Fever as a fun-time dance flick, when it was actually one of the single most depressing things ever committed to film, 2012’s Magic Mike is nowhere near as sexy as people imagine. Sure, it had Channing Tatum wiggling around with his top off a lot, but beyond that was a bleak drama about a man struggling to escape his own destiny.
So the news that there would be a sequel – Magic Mike XXL – was incredibly promising. The first film ended with Tatum, disillusioned and filled with self-loathing, turning his back on stripping for good. But Magic Mike XXL is about his inevitable return. That’s bound to be bleak, isn’t it? It’s going to be the most miserable film ever made, isn’t it? Let’s look at the just-released Magic Mike XXL trailer to see just how overwhelmingly depressing it is.
Good start. The trailer opens with Mike reflecting on his decisions on a beach. Look at it. Sand. Sea. A sky so huge that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. Mike’s been through a lot, he’s had his humanity carved out of him, but now finally he’s ready to make peace with himself.
And his furniture business – the get-out card that propelled him through the horrors of the last film – seems to be thriving. Perhaps we got this one wrong. Perhaps Magic Mike XXL is going to be a low-key story about the redemptive power of honest work. Perhaps it might even be heartwarming.
Oh, wait a second, what’s this? A man mimicking ejaculation with a water bottle? Does this mean…
Oh for God’s sake, yes it does. I was completely wrong. That last scene, and this one – part of a caption reading: ‘We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very hard’ – seem to suggest that Magic Mike XXL is done with all that interesting drama nonsense. Now it’s just a winky-nudgy, self-referential parade of male toplessness.
And, right on cue, here’s that parade of male toplessness. They they all are, hooking their necks down to make their abs stick out – Magic Mike, one of his friends, and one of the werewolves from Twilight who’s turned to stripping as a last resort to fund his twin addictions to fake tan and pasties.
And more toplessness. So far, aside from one shot at the beginning, this trailer has just been a load of decontextualised stripping footage. I don’t think that Magic Mike XXL will actually have a plot. I think it might be the Staying Alive to Magic Mike’s Saturday Night Fever.
Now one of the strippers is having a romantic encounter with Andie MacDowell. Does that count as plot? I suspect the fact that this shot is accompanied by the literal sound of a cougar roar might suggest that it does not.
Stop EVERYTHING! Actual plot alert. It took a while, but finally here’s an explanation of what Magic Mike XXL is actually going to be about. So, the last film was about a young stripper who desperately wanted to escape the business that was slowly corroding his soul. This film, meanwhile, is about the same stripper trying to think up some fun new dance moves for his sexy buddies. That’s plot, isn’t it?
The trailer concludes with a perfect summation of everything we’ve just seen. Two topless bros in backwards-facing baseball caps simultaneously dry-humping women and high-fiving each other. They could probably turn this shot into a five-second GIF, run it as a loop, screen it as the entire film and I suspect nobody would notice.
Well, quite.
