Wednesday, July 01, 2015

And You Still Show Them Tits & Ass

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I feel as if there are two ways I need to review Magic Mike XXL. I need to tell you about it as a film, a proper film, and I need to tell you about the ass, the proper ass. Let's get the ass out of the way first since when it comes to ass I'm always impatient - I think the claims I've seen around that there's less nudity in this sequel than there was in the first movie might be right... but part of me also wonders, when it comes to the first film, if our brains might have mashed together the full strip routines that got released online outside of the film with what we see in Magic Mike Volume One, too. There's less nudity in the first Magic Mike than we project onto the finished film - in the finished film we only see glimpses of Matt Bomer's Ken Doll and Doctor routines and Joe Manganiello's golden-god, et cetera. The bit and pieces so firmly, deeply lodged in our brains came from the DVD extras.

While I'm not going to make a laundry list of the nudity that Magic Mike XXL does offer up -- although I was certainly fond of the moment where a bare-assed Joe Manganiello picks up Channing Tatum, and I think I might have gone temporarily blind when Matt Bomer reached into his stripper pants and pulled out a full fist of bulge -- it is going to disappoint those of you going to this movie just for nudity. Dick Count: still a big fat painfully non-phallic Zero. 

But the movie is still sexy, at least in spurts, and funny, and as a whole not half bad. As with most road trip movies it's discombobulated and episodic and some bits work better than others. But there are two scenes worth the price of admission alone, classics already if you ask me - you've glimpsed them both in the trailer. There's Joe Manganiello doing a routine inside a Quickie Mart for the befuddled and dour girl behind the counter that's easily the film's highlight (I'm gonna have "I Want It That Way" stuck in my head for weeks; Joe proves himself a deft comedian under those rock-hard everythings (although the less said about the moments where he's called on to act anything but goofy the better). And the scene at Andie McDowell's palatial Southern Fried Estate, where the accents are thick as molasses in Summah-tahm and the rivers run red with vino, is a small sexy delight from start to "glass slipper" finish.

What works, works. What works it, works it. I didn't really have a problem with Cody Horn in the first movie (here's my review of the first movie, by the way) but color me shocked that Amber Heard (who I usually find, Jessica Rabbit shape notwithstanding, flat as cardboard on-screen) is an improvement in the "Let's give Channing a lady to flirt with so it's not a sausage smorgasbord" department - this is gonna sound massively silly, and it is, but I actually honestly got a little misty-eyed when Channing taught her the power of letting go of your troubles and just having some fun by sitting on her face and grinding her. The power of magical thrusting! It is a balm for all of our souls, amen amen amen.


1 comment:

biblestudy bulge said...

WTF JA? Who the hell goes to a movie about male strippers (featuring beefcake hunk actors not known for their acting abilities) for anything OTHER than the nudity?

*Puts on a haughty English accent* Oh no dear friends I only went to this Magic Mike XXL to bask in the narrative nuances and complex sociopolitical analyses and the thematic undertones of isolation, acceptance and ultimately redemption...definitely NOT in the hopes of seeing some "dick slangin"...as the urban youth put it.

:/