Magic Mike XXL: Not Enough Sexy, Way Too Much ZZZZZ…

It is difficult to imagine that a film about beautiful men and women gyrating and showing off their bodies could somehow go wrong.  This film went wrong.

Unlike the first film which at least managed some degree of entertainment, director Gregory Jacobs’ XXL is a series of small sexy islands in a vast sea of dusty dialogue, unbearable existentialism and boring everything else.

Premise: Mike Lane and his crew have one last hoorah at a stripper convention with many laughs and antics on the way. Result: Boring and messy even when naked is a terrible, terrible thing.

It is difficult to tell what XXL is about or better what it is not about. It attempts to be a naked-fest, a thought-piece on life and love, a quasi-romantic comedy, a drug-use cautionary tale, a commercial for frozen yogurt, a bordello-how-to kit, and just about anything in between. It successfully executes on none of these objectives.

First of all we have our old protagonist Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) formerly “Magic Mike” but for whom the magic is clearly gone. Sans girlfriend and with a struggling (dream) business he finds himself lost (yup the whole dream logic from the first film has back-fired). Enter stage left his scantily clad brethren of yore to his rescue – Richie (Joe Manganiello), Tarzan (Kevin Nash), ken (Matt Bomer) and Tito (Adam Rodriguez)- asking him to join them on one last sexy hoorah at a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach; he literally can’t stop his body from dancing with excitement.

What ensues is a clichéd, fairly sad mess of a film that involves a road-trip circus with stops along the way that include visits with granny & co (we’re looking at you Andie MacDowell), Queen of the Strippers (Jada Pinkett Smith, with a surprise stripper cameo from Michael Strahan) and baking-talk with the lamest love-object yet in Zoe (Amber Heard Depp).

not enough

To be frank, the primary reason for watching this film (supposedly and confirmed by the all the shrieking women and gay men in the audience) is the presence of hunks being hunky; this is clear. But while there is certainly some hunkiness as shirt-allergies ensue, it is comparatively minimal. And even when these strippers do just that, the events are random and thrown together with heat that is more akin to supper by candle light than blazing fire.

Worse still is what isn’t sexy at all: the majority of this film. The sex-fueled events are thinly sprawled across the film like loosely connected oases amidst a vast desert of entertainment.   Scene after scene is infected by mindless dialogue to set up back stories and character issues that are tangentially addressed or dropped altogether.

And yet the mood-murdering pontification and character conflicts are everywhere; they become nothing more than constant, eternal pointlessness whose resolutions never made it off the editing room floor leaving audiences wondering why all the distraction without the payoff ( unless of course the film was a brilliant metaphor for stripping in general.)

The performances range from bearable to bordering on soft-core porn. Realistically everyone is fair with some strong delivery from Pinkett-Smith and McDowell as well as Bomer pulling off the unthinkable by making his absurd Reiki-master routine tolerable. Tatum, however, gets lost in his own ad-libbing while Nash and Manganiello fall often into mood-killing meandering.

In the end, XXL is just boring. Complete with an unsatisfying, abrupt ending, what was expected to be a fun, sexy sequel is nothing but blue-balls in Church. Hmm, maybe not quite as sexy as all that.

Rating: 5 – A luke-warm Pinot Grigio