I was mad at Netflix having nothing to watch (seriously, it actually feels like they have less content than they supposedly do just by looking at the home page) and found Magic Mike's Last Dance. I decided to put it on and say I've finished the trilogy but I'll never watch it again. I barely made it through the whole thing. The second sequel had some moments that were kind of funny but the drive for the crew to put on a big money-making show seemed rooted too deeply in fantasy and not reality. Which the first movie excelled at. The whole point being: Mike can make it on his own doing his own thing. The second movie assumes he can't give up stripping, the third assumes he can't even make it as a carpenter, and he still can't keep a woman in his life.
The conceit of the third movie is... what if Mike was Julia Roberts and Selma Hayek was Richard Gere? Mike's bottomed out and bartends at a rich woman's fundraiser, where he runs into one of the women he stripped for in the first movie. She happens to mention to the rich woman, Maxandra, that Mike's an ex-stripper and could give her a lap dance to make her feel less shitty about her divorce. Mike says she can have one provided she doesn't expect getting off. I don't remember "happy endings" ever being part of Mike's previous arrangements. He was a bit of a manwhore but not for hire, that made his character more compelling. All the gritty realism gets replaced with more polished fantasy. Mike and Max do this insanely over-choreographed routine before going to bed, it's very difficult to watch and take seriously, as the movie has to build a plot around these set-pieces, something the original didn't need to do and kept sensibly delegated to montages and establishing scenes. Soon as Max is offering Mike a "job" in London, you immediately see how this has turned into himbo Pretty Woman. Once they start recruiting male dancers and talk about stripping, all I could think was this is just Pretty Woman meets The Full Monty. In the midst of this they try to make a commentary on feminism and women having it all. All the while we're treated to a "narration" from Max's adopted daughter, who's writing a novel (of a whopping forty pages) about Max and Mike. It's kind of cute and it introduces a rather precocious, geeky looking girl into the story without her being involved in the "scandalous" parts, and Mike warms to her and could genuinely make a decent father to the girl. She barely considers Max her mother. But her novel reads more like an essay on the cultural significance of dance that intertwines Max and Mike's story. It's tied up neatly but it's a weird device to utilise by the third sequel.
Max is insufferable and self-sabotaging. But allegedly she's made for Mike and they're destined to be together. So much of the natural dialogue is stripped out of this installment, Mike isn't that interesting, you don't care that much he fights with Max and their sexual chemistry comes from their compatibility as dancers and creatives, it doesn't seem to provide that much substance to their relationship. His other girlfriends were down-to-earth but they were also "girls", Mike needs a woman, and by the end of the movie she can't be his sugar momma cause she's broke, I'm assuming from the fines the council put on her for gutting a heritage building. The foils in this movie are actual laws that Max thinks she can circumvent with her money and are being used against her by her ex, or when Mike thinks if he just "woos" the stuffy conservative member of the heritage council or whatever she is with a bunch of hot guys dancing on a bus (that was the point I nearly gave up). I saw that coming, the good old "get to the heart of the mean, conservative bureaucrat that's threatening to destroy the big show so they bend to the hero's needs". The show itself is okay but their little dance for the menopausal members of the audience was barely watchable. I had this on in my periphery while I played Stardew Valley and I couldn't bring myself to watch it. Plus if you're going to have an extended dance scene with twenty minutes of rain effects in an old building that would clearly do so much more damage than already done, to have it bankrupt the main characters like it never mattered, don't expect me to care that much when the two leads finally kiss. It was awful. The original guys come back for a Zoom call, which is a COVID trope at this point when a lot of sequels were being stymied by the pandemic. Now it's just a lazy way to get previous characters involved easily. That was probably the absolute worst scene. We didn't need Magic Mike XXL. We definitely didn't need Last Dance. Way back when I saw promos and billboards for Magic Mike, I was so against it, I hate seeing male strippers, I hate the double standards of men being groped or getting away with dry humping women who are squealing like idiots. Shit men can't get away with when women are stripping (and I'm not saying they should, it's just sad we accept this dichotomy). I assumed it'd be cringe, but it was a fantastic drama, it had interesting stakes, it had an ugly underbelly to examine and it had genuinely humorous moments. It's a highly regarded movie. It ended nicely. Everything else, including the international stage show, was a cash grab. We didn't need the Magic Mike Trilogy.
Then I went to Amazon and put on Firestarter, which I've put off watching. The book is horribly boring, so I appreciate the film did a reasonable job of trimming off the boring shit. It was a slog getting through everything between Andy and Charlie being detained and them escaping. But Blumhouse being involved in this didn't make it that compelling. The acting's fine, the change of characters is fine. It's very whittled down. Also Charlie ends up with her parents powers as well, which is kind of lazy considering the point was nobody could predict Charlie would have pyrokinesis from the modified genes of her parents. In all honesty, she's more like Carrie when she's being bullied and finally fighting back with her powers, but it was too convenient to make her telepathic and telekinetic. She's also not endearing like Drew Barrymore's version, she's just the miserable, dark child stereotype that's been overused by now. (The 1984 trailer is basically a short movie that spoils the whole thing).
I liked that she's expected to save her dad rather than having her detained with him, however he doesn't want her to, he's obviously there as bait. I didn't expect Charlie to side with Rainbird, in the book he has a very twisted interest in Charlie which borders on pedophilic. In this, despite Rainbird being responsible for the mother's death, Charlie still takes pity on Rainbird and escapes with him. I think he mentions he considers her his kin as they both could've been used and she recognises this but not with much incentive to, in the book he spends more time emotionally manipulating her into trusting him until she no longer does. But the lack of budget also meant that all the big explosion set-pieces in the book and original film weren't done. The boring passages with the Shop workers aren't here but the replacements with Hollister (played by a black woman because fuck it, it doesn't matter) and Wanless, the doctor behind Lot Six, aren't all that interesting. We get exposition over Charlie being a potential WMD that Hollister wants to pacify and control, she's not going to make an army of Charlies (this line is delivered so badly), it's not particularly original. The 1984 version is pretty much faithful to the book, I saw it decades ago but don't remember a lot. This recent version feels low budget, it's not much of a cast, it's bare-bones, the effects look competent. Blumhouse movies are just that, reasonably competent but not the giant masterpieces, (outside of Get Out), nor do they need to be, I think they're okay with these breaking even. The Exorcist remake looks like utter dross I won't touch, but Firestarter isn't worth it, it critically bombed, and if Blumhouse's new model is just rebooting good to middling former franchises forever, I don't want to know about it. This is all terrible. I hope they don't go anywhere with either of these properties.
So, that was my afternoon barely watching two movies nobody asked for. Oh, and Magic Mike wasn't technically on my watchlist, I put it on for the sake of it to see how stupid it could possibly be and wasn't surprised.
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