When I first heard that there was going to be a stripper movie about men, I thought “FINALLY”!! From the awful yet somehow cult classic “Showgirls” to the rarely mentioned “Striptease” and including a bunch of Lifetime movies in between, we only see the strippers as female. Well, now we have a movie for the ladies featuring a bunch of hot guys!!
Mike (Channing Tatum) works several jobs during the day and strips at night, but his real dream is to open a business crafting custom furniture (fire extinguisher coffee tables and other unusual designs). Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) is his night-time boss, and the owner of the Xquisite Male Dance Revue which is located in Tampa, Florida. (As this movie is loosely based on Tatum’s history of male dancing in Tampa, it looked like the movie was filmed there too). Dallas wants to open another club in Miami, and he promises Mike a cut of the profits. Some of the other players at the club include Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), who actually had a performance as a Ken Doll (it was pretty sweet!!), Tito (Adam Rodriguez) and the DJ, Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias).
Mike meets nineteen-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) at one of his day jobs, as a construction worker. They run into each other later that evening and Mike sees something special in Adam, so he takes him under his wing as the newest dancer at the Xquisite Male Dance Revue (the tune for his first dance?? “Like a Virgin”). He later meets Adam’s sister Brooke (Cody Horn) who soon becomes his love interest in the movie.
Unfortunately, there is a dark sub-plot involving Tobias’s side business of selling drugs, which he involves Adam in, which I didn’t care for. I thought it didn’t add much to the movie. Can’t we just have a frivolous movie with some male strippers and not much else, is that too much to ask??
I would have liked to see more of the performances, and more interaction between the male dancers (behind the scenes stuff, things of that nature). And no offense to her, but the actress who played Brooke was terrible. Her acting was wooden and she just dragged the movie down. I would have rather seen Blake Lively or Julia Stiles in the role. Also, I really like Olivia Munn, but I didn’t really care for her character Joanna in this film. She confused me. I wasn’t sure if she was being truthful with Mike most of the time. (She was his friend with benefits and provided one of the two pairs of boobies that were exposed in the film).
This is the closest I’ve been to a strip club in quite a while, and it was a fun ride overall!! Although, I must say that I’ve never seen a dancer in real life that had the moves that Channing Tatum has!! Holy cow.
