MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE

Despite its threadbare storyline this third instalment of the Magic Mike story is fairly watchable, almost entirely due to the charisma of Channing Tatum, who is not only sexy as all-get-out (or ‘all-get-off’!) but extremely likeable – lovable even. Mike is rescued from working as a bartender in Florida by rich-bitch Salma Hayek who takes him to London to stage a strippergram version of an ailing West End play in a theatre her husband owns.

Hayek is slumming in this role but she throws herself into it much as when she played the vampire dancer in Tarantino’s From Dusk to Dawn. Steven Soderbergh, who directed this and the first of the trilogy but not the second, is also slumming but he gives the movie plenty of pace and pizzazz. None of the new troupe of dancers gets a decent back story, and the show-stopping finale amounts to no more than a series of raunchy Madonna-style music videos. Nobody actually goes ‘the Full Monty’, which feels like a rip-off. The opening scene, in which Sayek purchases a sensationally erotic private dance from Tatum, is the highlight not only of this episode but of the entire series – and probably worth the price of admission.