Magic Mike always seemed like an odd proposition for a film. At the time, Channing Tatum was still seen as a pretty but dumb actor, so the idea of him mixing it up with Steven Soderbergh, one of the great modern filmmakers, for an auto-biographical story about his time as a male stripper, was hard for people to get their heads around. It proved to be a success though. But that hasn’t stopped Honest Trailers from ripping it apart ahead of Magic Mike XXL’s release.
It’s safe to say that the above clip produced mega-lols all around. First and foremost because it reminded the whole world about how much time Channing Tatum spends humping the faces of adoring women while wearing a G-string. Plus, it’s hard not to get drawn into the vast array of strippers’ pecks and abs and general beauty. They’re hypnotic.
But Magic Mike isn’t just about the sexy escapades of a group of ridiculously attractive men. Oh no. Don’t forget this is a Steven Soderbergh film, so there’s also a healthy mixture of struggle, injustice, and despair for movie fans to suffer through, too.
Sure, Magic Mike’s life sees him frolic with Olivia Munn on a regular basis, as well as partaking in threesomes with her, but he wants more than that. He wants to start up his own business with the hundreds of crumpled up dollar bills that he collects and has stuffed down his pants on a nightly basis. Mike just can’t seem to raise quite enough money for that though, hence the stuggle.
It’s not just Magic Mike that has problems though. Alex Pettyfer’s The Kid has a problem with drugs to such an extent that he has a cartel on his tail, while Kevin Nash’s Tarzan is a full-blown alcoholic and Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas is more than willing to screw over his friends to earn a few extra dollars.
Magic Mike also gives us a look at the everyday lives of these strippers too. Sure, between the hours of 10pm to 5am they have to shed their clothes to make some dough, but for the rest of the day they have to make sure that they’re in prim and proper condition for their scantily clad escapades. This means that they have to go shopping for thongs, straighten out the crumped up $1 bills that are flung at them, and go above and beyond looking for a way out of this business.
And while the above video does a superb job of making fun of Magic Mike for showing us all that, these are also the reasons why the film proved to be such a critical and financial success, and why it’s sequel, Magic Mike XXL, could be the sleeper hit of the summer. We’ll know if that’s the case when Magic Mike XXL is released on Wednesday, July 1.
