Steven Soderbergh's film "Magic Mike" is as shamelessly appealing as the male strippers it portrays. Being a Soderbergh film, it sports an Altmanesque bevy of characters effortlessly juggled until the film seems to grow vague and uncertain, a la even his best films, like "Traffic".
Channing Tatum has much at stake here, given that the film is based on his own experiences as a stripper in Tampa and that he is a producer and star. While he is never less than engaging, he lacks the acting chops of George Clooney or Matt Damon, Soderbergh's leading men of choice for several fruitful years. Tatum nonetheless has his ample charms, which happen to include a buff physique that he is as eager to show off as his audience is to eyeball it.
Given much of the film's setting in the Xquisite strip club, there are a number of scenes of the dancers' routines, which inevitably include flashes of all-but-the Full Monty. With actors as game and entertaining as Joe Manganiello and Matt Bomer involved, these scenes are more than your typical beefcake bonanza. While Matthew McConaughey's outsized performance is just shy of camp, it is indeed a breakout role, and is perhaps the best example of the director's knack for showcasing actors with leading man looks (Clooney) and character actor aspirations.
On that account, McConaughey is one of the chief strengths of the film. Whether you find him overbearing or delightful depends on your appetite for showmanship, but having shed the square peg that was his cross to bear as a bland leading man for years, a sort of male Kate Hudson, he has taken a gamble. Lucky for him, he is not only in good hands with Soderbergh, but he just might earn his first Oscar nod for Supporting Actor, come next winter.
The rest of the cast is generally inspired, including relative newcomer Cody Horn, whose pragmatic, natural beauty is a welcome counterpoint to the abundance of muscle and testosterone on display. Hers is a subtle, intriguing performance that helps anchor her scenes with Tatum, scenes that might otherwise lapse from familiar tropes to shopworn cliches. Soderbergh seems at once enamored of Tatum and aware of his limitations as an actor, hence the abundance of shirtless shots and emphasis on an entertaining supporting cast.
As for Alex Pettyfer, the ostensible center of the story, he is like a personification of the Velvet Underground song "I'll Be Your Mirror", indelibly about and sung by chanteuse Nico. Not unlike the rather more ambitious, Oscar-winning turn by Benicio Del Toro in "Traffic", Pettyfer seems to gradually refract our attention after commanding it for much of the film. Pettyfer deserves credit for underplaying his role, and it is this subtlety that draws us in, not to mention his supple-yet-not-overly- ripe body, which is on ample display. While McConaughey laps up much of the ink for this film, it is likely that Pettyfer will surprise us in the future with work that will build on his subdued work in MM.
A not-so-quietly subversive mainstream film that cleverly puts the men on revealing display while the women remain relatively cloaked, it reveals the intellectual showman that Soderbergh has become. Once the indie upstart of "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", he rebounded from an early commercial slump to create such clever entertainments as "Out of Sight" and "The Limey", before juggling the slick "Ocean's" series with arcane works like "The Girlfriend Experience". In less assured hands, MM may have been the cheesefest its misleading previews threatened.
While this film may mark a step towards marrying his arty instincts with his commercial aspirations, it is unclear whether Soderbergh will continue to work to narrow the gulf between his dual cinematic personas. It will be interesting to see if he can achieve a level of commercial success for his artier fare, a feat that the less prolific but unusually successful artist Todd Haynes has accomplished.
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