Review: Magic Mike

Steven Soderbergh continues to impress. He's one of the most unpredictable of American directors, capable of being political or pulpy, working on blockbusters or shoestrings. Earlier this year, he made Haywire, an action movie with a kickass girl hero, and now he turns his sights to male strippers with Magic Mike.

Perhaps even more extraordinary than stretching out and working in different styles and genres is the fact that Soderbergh isn't afraid to deal with sex. Sex -- and I'm talking human sexuality, rather than women in tight clothes -- has always been troublesome in Hollywood, but with the economy and the overall atmosphere of fear and panic, it has become even more scarce.

In his career, Soderbergh tackled sex right away with Sex, Lies & Videotape. He created one of the steamiest love scenes of recent years with Out of Sight, directed a segment of a triptych about sex, Eros, and then -- most daringly -- he made The Girlfriend Experience, a low budget story about the life of a call girl, featuring a real-life porn star, Sasha Grey. Overall, Magic Mike is as safe as an actual male stripper; the sex is there for show, but it still acknowledges the existence of female urges and fantasies.

Channing Tatum -- who also appeared in Haywire -- stars as Magic Mike. He's a popular, Tampa, FL, stripper with some great moves, but his dream is to make furniture, so he works extra jobs trying to save money. On a construction job, he meets a green kid, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who winds up going to a club with him. By the end of the night, Adam has been pushed out on stage and performed his first striptease.

Some of the plot elements are fairly familiar after that. Adam grows more and more arrogant, begins to enjoy his fame a bit too much, and becomes involved with drugs. He loses a huge stash of drugs and owes some thugs a large chunk of change. He also threatens the older Mike, who wants a behind-the-scenes percentage of a new strip club that the owner, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), hopes to open in Miami.

What's more, Adam has a cute sister, Brooke (Cody Horn), whom Mike takes a shine to. But she sees him as a bad influence on her brother, so it's an uphill battle. The beautiful Olivia Munn co-stars as a girl that Mike likes, but she refuses to see him as anything more than a sex object. However, despite all these old chestnuts, Soderbergh turns in a fresh film. He's less interested in hitting the plot points as he is exploring the spaces between.

His skills as a cinematographer are apparent as well: he captures an open-air feel and uses warm colors to create a sense of temperature; these establish a loose and organic tone. You can almost smell the warm air coming in through the windows, as well as the sweat of the clubs and parties. It feels like the story is unfolding in a real space and not a vacuum-sealed Hollywood set.

Tatum thrives in an environment like this. It's most gratifying to see him evolve from a glowering thug to a warm, funny presence, capable of living in the moment. Just a year ago, I had written him off, and now he seems poised on the verge of being a great new star. Likewise, McConaughey -- who was a joke a few years ago -- has happily turned back into a character actor, playing offbeat Texans rather than vapid leading men. His performances here and in the recent Bernie have put him back on the map. As for the younger actors, Munn has a lot of charisma, Horn could be promising, and as Adam, Pettyfer projects just the right amount of arrogance.

Magic Mike certainly isn't a great film, but it has a most welcome amount of life in a summer that's all about marketing and trying to please the audience. The only downside is that Soderbergh announced his "retirement" recently, and though it's unclear as to what that's going to entail, it would be a huge shame if films this good were to disappear from multiplexes.

Review: 21 Jump Street

Based on the late 1980s TV series that starred a young Johnny Depp, the new movie 21 Jump Street might have been yet another example of Hollywood avoiding new ideas and lazily recycling old ones. Fortunately, the new movie is well aware of this trend, and says so, right in an early line of dialogue. This small gesture is enough to raise the movie to an entirely different level of awareness.

21 Jump Street tells the ludicrous story of undercover cops infiltrating high school. Though their own high school careers (seen in flashback) were not so hot, stud Jenko (Channing Tatum) and nerd Schmidt (Jonah Hill) are now best friends and partners on the Metropolitan City police force. Assigned to the Jump Street program, their mission is to uncover the source of a new drug called HFS (which stands for "Holy" and then two words that can't be repeated here). 

The twist is that their identities are switched, and the shy Schmidt ends up in drama class while the not-too-bright Jenko fraternizes with the AP chemistry nerds. Additionally, high school has changed: now kids are "green" and tolerant, and frown upon arrogant jocks. In other words, the tactics that once made Jenko popular no longer work, and Schmidt's nerdiness becomes an unexpected asset.

Basically the movie's theme is that, no matter how crazy or willing we are, the world simply doesn't operate like a cop movie (or cop TV show) says it should. With this complex, post-modern, one-upmanship of life vs. entertainment, the movie creates endless opportunities for jokes. These cops show up to a chase sequence wearing the most hysterical outfits imaginable, bracing themselves for car explosions that never happen. The characters don't even learn any lessons, except maybe how to remain mismatched buddies.

By continually thwarting expectations, by teasing and upending conventions, and by remaining funny all the way up to (and during) the end credits, 21 Jump Street becomes an honest-to-goodness anarchic comedy. Co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller previously made the animated Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Thus 21 Jump Street marks the third recent live-action movie made by animators, after Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and John Carter. Perhaps animation is fertile training ground, breeding a tougher work ethic, with more attention to detail. Indeed, it probably demands rigorous planning to take such a dumb concept and turn it into something so effortlessly brilliant.

Review: Haywire

Though director Steven Soderbergh has a wide-ranging filmography, it can be argued that his fun, genre entries (Out of Sight, The Limey, Ocean's Eleven, etc.), are overall better than his "serious" movies (Traffic, The Good German, Contagion, etc.). His new Haywire is a pared-down, almost simplistic action movie, mostly designed to showcase the beauty and power of his new star, the female mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano.

Mallory (Carano) is a super-cool secret agent with impeccable mixed martial arts fighting skills. After finishing up a job in Barcelona freeing a hostage, she looks forward to relaxing a bit. Unfortunately her employer (Ewan McGregor) has an emergency: an easy two-day job wherein she must pose as the partner to agent Paul (Michael Fassbender). It's not long before Mallory realizes that the whole thing is a setup designed to get her out of the way. Now, escaping in a borrowed car with a civilian (Michael Angarano), she has only one chance to clear up the loose ends and set things right.

The movie features many fine, recognizable actors in small roles; their dialogue is spare, and never divulges too much information or panders to the audience. The story itself is a fairly old one in this genre, and aside from the fact that Haywire is told in a non-linear fashion, it doesn't have much to add. Soderbergh presents the fight scenes cleanly and simply, often without a music score, though he uses a funky brass score for chase scenes. However, in stripping away the fat, Soderbergh has also taken away some of the movie's emotional content; though it's a thrilling experience, it's also a somewhat surface one.