Magic Mike : Movie Review


When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike—which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue—the audience in my screening burst into a near-unanimous extended cheer. The gifts that made him a viable exotic dancer at age 18 have recently made the 32-year-old Tatum the male movie star of the moment. His appeal is based on working-class humility paired with otherworldly charisma, an impossible body, and the intelligence to make his use of it seem effortless. Now, as then, he never fails to give us what we paid to see. But what is he really revealing? The highly calculated Magic Mike is pure Hollywood self-mythology—a neo-Depression musical, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for shitty times, an origin-of-the-star story, and a projection of that star's hoped-for future.

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Author : Karina Longworth