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Magic Mike, 2012
Mike (Channing Tatum) works as a stripper in a nightclub run by Dallas (Matthew McConaughey). While working a day gig as a roofer, Mike meets the impulsive 19-year old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) and recruits him as a dancer. Mike quickly becomes attracted to Adam's older sister, Brooke (Cody Horn), who worries about Adam's wellbeing in the nightlife scene. As Adam embraces the hard-partying lifestyle more and more, his impulsiveness threatens Mike's dreams for the future.
Overall I enjoyed this comedy-drama, though it contained two of my biggest stressors: people doing things that are theoretically sexy that I do not find sexy, and trying to get good rates on a small business loan.
What I think the film does best is tap into the way that someone can be trapped in a situation and not really see a way out of it. Mike is determined to get a furniture making business off of the ground. He's hustled to save a decently sized down-payment, but his poor credit history--partly a function of the nature of his work--means that he cannot get a loan. Whether his plan is actually tenable or not, Mike grows increasingly anxious as Dallas plans to move the club to Miami, but with less pay than originally promised.
In this regard, Mike is well-matched with Brooke, who is trapped in a very different way. Brooke feels responsible for Adam, but he is legally an adult and she has little power over what happens to him. She can't keep him from being around or taking drugs, nor does she have any say over who he spends his time with. The fact that he lives with her and their sibling relationship provides her with a bit of leverage, but as Adam sinks into casual drug use and surrounds himself with other people who make bad choices, even that power doesn't do much.
Performance wise, Pettyfer is appropriately obnoxious and frustrating as Adam. His initial shyness around the other dancers belies a personality that is inherently impulsive and selfish. We learn from Brooke that Adam blew a sports scholarship by getting into a physical altercation with the coach on the first day of practice. Adam chases his own pleasures, and his original hesitations are really just someone getting their sea legs.
The real standout, though, is Tatum. Reid Carolin's writing seems perfectly suited to Tatum's particular brand of charisma, which can be summed up as "is this guy really dumb? Wait, is he actually smart? No wait, I think he might be stupid after all? Or is he?!" (Something Tatum also leveraged really well in The Lost City). There are these little touches in the writing that Tatum delivers perfectly, like when he asks his grad-student girlfriend (Olivia Munn) if she's studying "social studies". There are these very real verbal miscues--like when he goes to introduce Brooke and introduces her as "Adam's brother"--that ground the character incredibly well.
Cody Horn's solid but subdued performance as Brooke was also really good. Her character's more withdrawn nature makes for a really strong contrast with the screaming bluster of the strip club sequences. She's like a patch of calm water in a storm, and it makes a lot of intuitive sense that Mike would be drawn to her. Late in the film he tries to draw a line between who is really is and what he does for work, and you can tell that she is the kind of person he wants to be around. Their slow-building romance was one of my favorite parts of the film.
As for the strip club sequences themselves? Meh. Like, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of dance and I generally have a huge appreciation for athleticism. I was kind of disappointed that the dancing didn't seem to have more of a relationship to the story itself. Yeah, sure, we see Adam's increased confidence. But the sequences are all very brief and kind of redundant. There would be some good dancing, but then every third move was *aggressive pelvic thrusts and it got kind of tiresome. I'm not saying it's not realistic or whatever, just that it was unengaging. The sequences often felt rushed, and it almost felt like there was a discomfort with letting there be any slowness or sensuality as opposed to either going silly and over the top or going really aggressive and having the dancers air-humping the audience.
What did impress me in the dance sequences was the work that clearly went into them, and the extent to which we do get to see the dance skills that Tatum brought to the film. He's very athletic and a really good dancer, and the final sequence in the film was probably the best of any of the dance numbers, if only because it actually took a moment to breathe instead of two minutes of posing and then down to a g-string.
(SIDENOTE: But the numbers, tho!: typically, a film will have between 1 and 3% of 1/10 ratings on IMDb. The male voters of that site have over 4% 1/10 votes for Magic Mike. Is this is homophobia, or just anger at the idea of women being sexual consumers or what?)
Aside from being underwhelmed by the nature and purpose of the dance sequences, I have very few complaints. I was pretty impressed with the character work and thought that the balance between comedy and drama was pretty deft.
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