Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Reid Carolin
Cast: Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Munn, Cody Horn, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello and Matthew McConaughey
Studio: Warner Brothers
Mike is a jack of all trades and is trying to start his own small business. I guess he is too old to be paying his college tuition. Anyway, his credit is bad, but his body is hot, so naturally he strips with the Xquisite Male Dance Revue to rake in extra cash. While doing a roofing job, Mike meets Adam, a guy who can’t seem to do anything right and later takes him out on the town. To return the favor, Adam helps to convince some sorority girls to attend that night’s show at Xquisite and agrees to help out backstage. Of course, a situation arises that forces Adam to go onstage and though he cannot strip or dance at all, his performance is a huge hit and he joins the Revue.
Everyone has different goals and dreams in this film. Adam wants to live it up as much as possible, which upsets his sister Brooke. Mike wants to leave the stage behind one day and settle down with a woman he can talk to, which definitely is not his promiscuous bed buddy Joanna. The club owner Dallas wants to make it to the big time in Miami and say “All right, all right, all right” as frequently as possible. And the audience wants to see attractive men shake it like a salt shaker. I will not say how the characters fared, but the audience definitely gets their wish.
The plot did ramble somewhat, but the characters were well drawn and there was reasonable character development. The film was often amusing, especially in the early part, the dance routines had some impressive elements, and the cast were mostly good. Less pleasingly, there were times when dialogue was difficult to make out, some plot threads were started and then left to dangle, and there was a phenomenal amount of bad language. The stripping/dancing scenes are the most interesting aspects of the film and I fond myself bored with everything else. It tries to be more than a stripper movie, but it fails at it. It’s not fun, it’s not dramatic it’s stuck in the middle and it seems to be an autopilot a lot of the time. I think if the film had taken more chances and tried to be darker, it could have been somewhere along the lines of Boogie Nights for the stripper industry.
RELEASE DATE: 06/29/2012
