Magic Mike puts the blue in Blu-ray
Channing Tatum and friends take it all off as ‘Magic Mike’ comes to home video.
Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike made waves this past summer with its promotional campaign that highlighted the movie’s biggest draw — male strippers. The previews were full of men dancing and ladies screaming, so anyone who went to the movie was expecting a rollicking good time, almost like a night out at the club without the guilt of actually going to a male stripper revue. Heck, the women at the advance screening I attended were ready to throw dollar bills at the screen, but a curious thing happened about midway through the movie: everyone realized that it wasn’t just about the fun-loving life of a male stripper, and by the end, you actually felt more icky after seeing the movie than you would have had you actually gone to a club.
The reason is because of a pesky little thing called a plot. Yes, Magic Mike actually has a story, and it’s not really all that pleasant. In fact, you come away really disliking quite a few of the characters who seemed so jovial at the start, particularly Alex Pettyfer’s The Kid (as Mike calls him) and Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas, who turns into a real slimeball by the end of the movie (and his incessant “alright alright alright” really becomes grating after the tenth time). The Kid, aka Adam, gets taken into the world of the male stripper by Mike when he’s at his lowest point, becomes a favorite with the clientele, gets himself into trouble by not following Mike’s rules, totally screws Mike out of his dream, and leaves him without so much as a thanks for bailing his ass out. Yuck.
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