movie review

Maggie

Director: Henry Hobson (2015)

As his daughter turns into a zombie, a father faces a terrible dilemma in this bleak gothic horror.

Fresh from the debacle of Terminator Genisys, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays against type in this thoughtful character study.

Sparse on action, low on budget and long on mood, it’s an admirable and interesting departure from Arnie’s usual flavour of explosive adventure.

It’s such a strange stitching together of component parts it could be a new round of TV’s improvisational game show Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Make a film with ‘zombies’ in the style of ‘Terence Malick’ starring ‘Schwarzenegger’. Go!

It’s a barking idea, albeit a welcome one. A provocative and almost perverse retooling of the Schwarzenegger brand.

Arnie plays Wade, tired, heavy footed farmer in a beard and lumberjack shirt. We meet him taking his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) home from hospital.

Maggie is infected with the Necrombulist virus which decays the skin and changes the victim into flesh eating animal.

Wade knows Maggie will never recover from the virus which has devastated the world. Friends in the local services collude against the federal authorities to help them spend some final quality time together.

As Maggie slowly changes Wade ponders how to deal with her inevitable decline.

It’s an apocalyptic world of burning fields, missing person posters, deserted petrol stations and rubbish filled streets. Marshal law and curfews are enforced by an oppressive bureaucracy and a heavy handed military.

As the camera chases Maggie across fields, she’s backlit with the sun creating a halo. There’s an emphasis on close up head shots in shallow focus. The palette is washed out, chilly and grim.

With a doomed father/daughter relationship it has echoes of John Wayne’s The Seachers (1956). Arnie has the rigidly defined acting range of the Duke and a similarly framed and monumental presence.

It’s the flip-side of Life After Beth (2014) which was played for laughs.

Maggie is well constructed, intelligent, ambitious and achieves a scope beyond it’s budget limitations. Kudos to Arnie for using his industry clout to have it made.

But with it’s sombre, reflective tone and focus on parental guilt, broken homes and self-harm, it’ll disappoint anyone who is expecting the Terminator to turn up and save the day.

★★★☆☆

Inside Out

Director: Pete Docter (2015)

Take an emotional trip through the mind of an ordinary girl in this worthy animation from Pixar.

The studio made the brilliant Toy Story trilogy but their most recent offering Monster’s University (2013) was mediocre at best.

Director Pete Docter was Oscar nominated for Up (2009) but hasn’t achieved the same heights here.

Inside Out is busy, colourful and undeniably ambitious and clever. The animation and design are excellent.

But it’s so well intentioned and keen to educate they forgot to make it particularly funny, engaging or exciting.

Eleven year old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) has moved with her parents (Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan) to San Francisco.

Riley’s emotions are represented by five brightly coloured characters: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust (Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling) .

They occupy her mind and dictate her moods and behaviour.

None of them are particularly likeable as they scream, shriek and squabble inside Riley’s brain – or the head-quarters as they call it.

Due to a secure and rural childhood, Joy is Riley’s dominant emotion. She’s bossy, hyperactive, manipulative, mendacious and far from endearing as the film imagines.

As Riley struggles with the trauma of a new city, house and school, Joy and Sadness are lost in the nether reaches of her brain.

The mismatched pair begin a perilous journey to HQ through the various areas of Riley’s subconsciousness and must learn to accept each other and learn it’s ok to be sad sometimes.

They encounter some mildly amusing creatures, of whom Bing Bong (Richard Kind) – Riley’s long forgotten imaginary friend – is the most fun.

Among the different environments are Imagination Land and Abstract Thought. There’s a very self-referential and Hollywood parody in the brain’s Dream Factory.

Meanwhile Fear, Anger and Disgust are left in charge – with predictably unhappy results.

There’s a definite sense of a concept tail wagging the dog of the story. Watching this movie is akin to being smacked around the head by a day glo psychology book. Or being given homework and told to have fun.

Plus for a lengthy part of the film Riley is a puppet, dangling at the command of her emotions. Similarly we can see the emotional strings the film uses to manipulate us.

And there are inconsistencies such as mum and dad’s emotions being appropriately gendered but Riley’s are male and female.

The wait for Pixar’s next feature length masterpiece continues.

The pre-feature short is a masterful musical called Lava, an intimate epic about singing volcanoes which overshadows the main event.

★★★☆☆

True Story

Director: Rupert Goold (2015)

Identity theft, serial killing and untrustworthy journalism make for a mire of mendacity in this chilly courtroom thriller.

It’s based on the memoir of Mike Finkel (Jonah Hill), a former New York Times journalist who was sacked for fabricating a story.

He receives a phone call asking for an opinion on homicide suspect Christian Longo (James Franco) who has been caught in Mexico using Finkel’s identity.

Longo is charged with murdering his wife and three daughters and faces the death penalty. As grisly details of the deaths emerge, he paints his family as a victim of harsh economic circumstance.

Sensing a book deal and career resurrection, Finkel interviews Longo in prison and a curious relationship develops based on questionable motives.

Longo is evasive about what happened and emphasises his ordinariness. Finkel equates his own lies to be crimes of a similar magnitude to those of the accused.

Spending a lot of time rubbing his eyes in front of a laptop in a lonely hotel room, Finkel is under pressure from the police, his publisher and his girlfriend Jill (Felicity Jones).

Hill, Franco and Jones have each been nominated for an Oscar. Hill in Moneyball (2011) and Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Franco in 127 Hours (2010) and Jones for A Theory Of Everything (2014).

Hill and Franco previously starred together in weak apocalypse comedy This Is The End (2013).

Principal photography on True Story began way back in March 2013 and it was released in the US in April 2015.

With Jones’ Oscar nomination announced in mid-January 2015, it’s tempting to imagine the producers threw in every useable piece of footage they possessed of her to capitalise on her resultant higher profile.

In any case her character Jill spends most of her scenes alone or not interacting with her fellow performers, such as in a courtroom scene where she simply stands and stares.

At other times she plays piano runs in the woods, immerses herself in work and takes baths. It all accentuates her isolation but has no bearing at all on the plot.

Jones and Hill’s characters have little screen time and she has no purpose other than to make Finkel seem a more rounded personality.

Without her – even with her – Finkel is self-absorbed, humourless, arrogant and professionally flawed. We wonder what attracted each to the other and why she stays with him.

It’s not the first film to dramatise a journalist’s attempts to exploit a prisoner for their own ends. Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood (pub. 1966) provided a basis for Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006).

A mournful soundtrack, muted colours, studied editing and a measured pace allows for a focus on strong performances.

But it’s difficult to place your sympathy on either of the wholly unreliable storytellers.

★★★☆☆

13 Minutes

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel (2015)

Cinema’s fascination with all things Der Fuehrer continues with this compelling true story about a lone assassination attempt on Hitler.

Georg Elser (Christian Friedel) is a liberty loving patriot who wants to prevent a war he believes will destroy Germany.

So on 8th November 1939 in a Munich beer hall he planted explosives timed to explode where Hitler was due to speak. High ranking Nazi’s Himmler, Heydrich and Goebbels were also present.

Due to fog changing his travel plans, Hitler avoids the bomb by thirteen minutes.

Seven people are killed and Elser is arrested. He chooses to sing rather than confess even his date of birth.

Through flashbacks we see Elser’s progress from pacifist musician to violent revolutionary.

He is a skilled musician, dancer, carpenter and clockmaker. Although a communist sympathiser not a party member, his attitudes harden when his friends are prosecuted by the Nazi’s.

The duplicitous way a political message is packaged and sold to a greedy public should act as a warning to a contemporary audience.

Explosions from the nearby quarry are a fanfare of the future, a suggestion of the horrors of war to come.

Although Chief interrogator Nebe (Burghart Klaussner) is quickly convinced Elser acted alone, he receives orders from Hitler to discover who the conspirators were.

The mute secretary typing notes is skilled at judging when to leave the room before the blood begins to flow.

After medieval torture involving straps and heated nails, Elser’s girlfriend Elsa (Katharina Schuttler) is threatened, adding emotional torment to the physical.

There’s beatings, hangings, humiliations, some photography and a fair amount of zither music.

Through a combination of editing (Alexander Dittner) and cinematography (Judith Kaufman) plus some choice screaming and vomiting from Elser, the eye-watering torture is suggested rather than shown.

The production design demonstrates excellent attention to detail for the sophisticated Nazi propaganda and the pre-war period as a whole.

Director Hirschbiegel was Oscar nominated for Downfall (2004), his masterful telling of the last days in Hitler’s bunker. His last film was the appalling biopic of the late Princess of Wales, Diana (2013).

Here he’s created a handsome, intelligent film with tremendous performances but it doesn’t reveal anything new.

★★★☆☆

Ant-Man

Director: Peyton Reed (2015)

Marvel Comics’ inch-high superhero springs into action but comes up short in this action heist caper.

After a difficult and rushed production, it arrives in cinemas labouring under a weak script, some surprisingly mediocre SFX and a mistaken if unwavering faith in the charisma of it’s leading man Paul Rudd.

What’s most impressive about Ant-Man is it manages to crawl to a conclusion despite the obstacles of bottomless plot holes and boulder sized inconsistencies strewn in it’s path.

This is busy, forgettable and easily the weakest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Genius inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) has created an Ant-Man suit. But after initial success he buried the research after a fatal accident.

He also discovered prolonged exposure to the suit’s active agent – the Pym Particle – causes psychological imbalance.

A beauty of steam punk design, the suit shrinks the wearer to ant sized dimensions while offering super strength.

It also seems to bestow a super leaping power and an imperviousness to injury.

Pym has also created a device to control ants giving the tiny warrior an airborne army to command.

However his former protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) is now a corporate boss and intends to use Pym’s technology to create a more powerful Ant-suit called Yellowjacket.

Cross wants to make a fortune selling Yellowjacket to evil military interests.

So Pym recruits cat burglar Scott Lang (Rudd) to use the Ant-suit to break into the highly guarded lab to steal back his data.

Lang is a pacifist do-gooder who’s estranged from his cute-button daughter and is short of cash.

Despite being more than qualified, Pym’s daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is not best pleased at being overlooked for the dangerous mission.

Lily is mostly required to stand and stare. She’s allowed to punch Rudd in the face but is generally employed to look pretty and be the recipient of Rudd’s ‘charm’.

As her onscreen dad, Douglas is cinema’s most action-orientated tweed-wearing elderly professor since Dr Jones Senior.

The former Oscar winner manfully does what he can with the material.

Even at full size Rudd is an anonymous leading man, mugging his way through scenes.

He can’t blame the script after he contributed a great deal to it. He does award himself an undeserved kiss.

It’s unsurprising Rudd is absent from the best scene. It occurs early doors where a younger Pym (an effectively CGI’d Douglas) faces off to an aged Howard Stark and Agent Carter (John Slattery and Hayley Atwell).

Rudd’s only saving grace is that he isn’t Ryan Reynolds, an actor even more forgettable who is unfathomably presented with leading roles.

Reynolds has been gifted the lead in X-Men spin-off Deadpool (2015) – this after being awful as DC’s Green Lantern (2011).

Stoll is kinda playing the Jeff Bridges role in Iron Man (2008) but lacks the big man’s roaring presence.

He can’t generate sufficient evil intent even when literally leading lambs to the slaughter.

In extremely minor parts the excellent actors Bobby Cannavale and Judy Greer scowl and scold to order.

The action scenes are dull fights or concerned with Ant-Man being flushed along drainpipes or falling from heights.

They are parallel redemption tales of father’s reconnecting with their daughters.

But the film runs shy of engaging with it’s emotional core, possibly for fear of alienating its teenage boy fan base with icky feelings.

So it undercuts potentially tender scenes with Rudd’s gurning face, reducing our engagement.

Ant-Man experienced a difficult and eventually rushed production.

After working on a script since 2003, original director Edgar Wright – Shaun of the Dead (2004) – and co-writer Joe Cornish – Attack the Block (2011) – were jettisoned in May 2014 prior to principal photography.

Creative differences were cited and the pair were replaced on writing duties by Rudd and Adam McKay, Rudd’s director on Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004).

Peyton Reed was dropped in as director and briefed to make the film conform more neatly to the Marvel movie template.

His most recent directorial effort was the weak but appropriately named Jim Carrey comedy Yes Man (2008).

Moments of Wright’s trademark zippy writing remain. So does his love of British pop culture in the form of Thomas the Tank Engine in a seemingly Hornby train advertisement-inspired set-piece.

Plus his deconstructive tendencies are apparent in Lang’s inept accomplices Luis, Kurt and Dave (Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, Tip Harris).

They are respectively hispanic, Russian and black. Each are so typically reductive of unthinking Hollywood, it suggests Wright intended to use his sly wit to invert their behaviour and our expectations.

Sadly non of this happens because in Reed’s pliant corporate hands all subtlety and irony is lost.

The trio remain un-amusing ethnic stereotypes played for broad and laughter-free comedy.

It’s interesting Russian sits alongside hispanic and black as an ethnic ‘other’ in Hollywood eyes.

More entertaining and/or interesting films featuring tiny protagonists are The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Innerspace (1987) and Honey I Shrunk The Kids (1989).

Them! (1954) and Antz (1998) offer larger amounts ant-related fun.

The best Marvel movies are expertly constructed entertainments who reach beyond their comic origins and core audience – but Ant-Man lacks ambition or wit and prefers to pander to its fan base of teenage boys.

It’s one good joke features British children’s character Thomas the Tank Engine – so if you’ve seen the trailer there’s no need to watch this.

★★☆☆☆

The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)

Director: Tom Six (2015)

This prison-based satirical surgical horror sequel is far too disgusting to swallow or stomach.

With it’s gleefully graphic and provocative portrayal of rape, castration and torture, it’s twisted, disgusting and obscenely offensive in every scene.

Despite his brutal methods of discipline, demented prison warden Bill Boss (Dieter Laser) struggles to control the inmates.

Due to impending election, State Governor Hughes (Eric Roberts) demands a drop in the violent incidents.

Instigating medieval torture is rejected as not effective – or cost efficient or possibly too lenient.

Inspired by the DVD copies of the first two movies -The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011) – his assistant Dwight Butler (Laurence R. Harvey) suggests the prisoners are stitched together mouth to anus to form a giant human centipede.

Offering a manic commitment to his role, Laser delivers an eye-popping and vein-bulging performance.

Former porn star Bree Olson appears as abused secretary Daisy and the Dutch director Tom Six appears as himself.

Both Laser and Harvey have starred in previous entries as the main antagonists, Dr. Josef Heiter and Martin respectively.

The half-hearted attempts at satirising the US penal system are swamped by the filmmaker’s desire to shock and sicken.

Bill Boss is described as sadistic and vile – a knowingly apt description for the film.

★☆☆☆☆

Song of the Sea

Director: Tomm Moore (2015)

Be swept away on waves of wonder by this gorgeously animated fairytale.

Moving and magical, it creates a lyrical land of enchantment and transformation, rich in celtic charm, myth and adventure.

Grief and love are buoyed by a strong script and ferried through a whirlpool of beautiful visuals on the musical currents of Irish folk band band Kila.

Central to the story are the Selkies of Irish folklore; seals who are humans on land.

They’re joined by crabs, badgers, whales and sea gods in this wonderfully realised world. Stone circles are glimpsed and electrical pylons resemble wicker men.

Lighthouse keeper Conor (Brendan Gleeson) is distraught after the loss of his wife Bronagh (Lisa Hannigan).

He struggles to care for his children Ben and Saoirse (David Rawle, Lucy O’Connell).

They’re a pair of scared, bored and vulnerable people and have a wonderfully observed relationship. They’re far from standard Hollywood cutsey kids and they’re all the more appealing for it.

So the squabbling siblings are sent to the grim city to live, leaving behind Ben’s brave and loyal sheepdog Cu.

It’s a grey polluted place where street urchins in Halloween costumes build bonfires. Rural paganism gives way to urban christianity.

When the mute Saoirse creates music on a conch shell bequeathed from their late mother, it attracts the attention of fairies.

They need the help of Saoirse to save them from the owl-witch Macha (Fionnula Flanagan) who is turning fairies to stone to prevent their feelings from hurting them.

Macha’s owls are not the tame messengers of Harry Potter’s world but malevolent dive-bombing fiends.

There is a secret key, a treasure chest and a special coat. A map leads to secret tunnels and hidden glades in forbidding woods.

Song of the Sea is far less frantic than recent movies such as the enjoyably knockabout Minions (2015). Loving craftsmanship and fine detail fill every frame.

The gorgeous artwork is so vividly textured when Ben takes shelter from a thunderstorm I worried the whole film would be washed away like the chalk pavement paintings in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964).

Influenced by the themes and tones of Japan’s famed Studio Ghibli, the parallels with their Ponyo (2008) demonstrate the universality of the story.

There are also nods to children’s classics E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982), The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Along with The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, How to Train Your Dragon 2, The Boxtrolls and the winner Big Hero 6, Song of the Sea was Oscar nominated for the best animated feature at the expense of the highly fancied and outright awesome The Lego Movie.

Song of the Sea deserves it’s place in this rarefied company and if The Lego Movie were to have ousted any of them, then Song of the Sea isn’t the weakest on the shortlist.

Following The Secret of Kells it’s the second feature in a row to be Oscar nominated from Irish animation house Cartoon Saloon. Kells was co-directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey. This time Moore is directing by himself.

With relationships based on love and bound together with loss, bad things are done with the best intentions. The power of the heartbreaking finale is based on healing not conflict.

This is very much at odds with the accepted commercial norm of cinematic storytelling and Song of the Sea is all the more rewarding for it.

This is one song you’ll want to play on repeat.

★★★★★

All American High Revisited

Director: Keva Rosenfeld (2015)

This warm and affectionate documentary is a surprisingly candid account of the lives of pupils who attended a US high school in the 1980’s.

Our amusement at their naivety is tempered by compassion when thirty years later the filmmakers track down various key students to catch up on their lives.

In 1984 Keva Rosenfeld shot All American High, a chronicle of the experience of the senior class at Torrance High School in California.

After a brief life in cinemas, it languished on a shelf.

Torrance High was a prosperous and predominantly white school populated by cheerleaders, jocks, prom queens, punks and preppies.

They’re indifferent to the educational exhortations of their well-meaning teachers, most of whom sport unfortunate facial hair.

In contrast to the digitised present where teenagers use smartphones to document their lives online, back then it was a novelty to record the teenage experience.

My experience of US High school is drawn exclusively from watching movies of the period, particularly the films of John Hughes such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

It’s fascinating and alarming how accurate those fictional portrayals were.

There are marching bands, parties, ball games, shopping trips, eating contests and low level political debate about the possibility of nuclear war.

At times it acts as an anthropological study of the mating rituals of American teens. Sex and drugs are dealt with in a jokey, dismissive manner – but there are hints not everybody was having a great time.

Finnish exchange student Rikki Rauhala provides narration and an outsiders eye. Later we catch up with Rikki and her teenage children as they watch the documentary together.

An optimistic teen has matured into a grounded adult but others are not so fortunate.

The filmmakers appear only briefly. They allow the students to speak for themselves and if they have a proxy mouthpiece, it’s probably the philosophical surf instructor.

★★★☆☆

Terminator Genisys

Director: Alan Taylor (2015)

The psychotic cyborg franchise suffers a serious metal fatigue as it clanks into gear for a fifth time.

Despite a sprightly comedy turn by Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s a dull and stupid sci-fi clunker with a confused script, curious casting, a jokey tone and variable CGI.

It’s little more than a rusty collection of old parts bashed together in a wreckers yard and re-tooled as a generic family friendly action movie.

In 2029, the leader of the resistance John Connor (Jason Clarke), leads the war against the machines and the Skynet operating system.

Skynet sends a Terminator (Schwarzenegger) to the year 1984 to kill John’s mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke). So John sends his trusted lieutenant Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to protect her.

What follows is a time-hopping mess full of routine action scenes devoid of character worthy of our interest.

It ends up in 2017 where the good guys have to save the future of mankind by attempting to unplug an app called genisys. That’s right, the big bad is an app.

The app is played by former Dr Who Matt Smith and it’s appearance and manner will seem familiar to anyone who remembers The Red Queen in Resident Evil (2002).

Because quantum nexus nonsense something, there are multiple versions of Terminators, explosions, cheap laughs and no chemistry between the romantic leads.

Emilia Clarke has the  unenviable task of replacing Linda Hamilton as Sarah Conner. She lacks the ripped intensity, plays her part like a stroppy teen and isn’t given any opportunity to suggest she can carry a major movie.

Famous for her frequent nudity in the TV series Games of Thrones, fans of the show may be disappointed she is always fully dressed.

Courtney was in the most recent and most terrible entry in the Die Hard franchise, A Good Day To Die Hard (2013). Here he’s awful: bland, smug and possessing less range and vitality than the robots.

Never more human than when he’s playing a robot, Schwarzenegger plays his once menacing character for broad, kiddie-friendly laughs.

It’s a vaudeville grandfather performance and I expected him to start handing out Wether’s Originals and pulling out silver pennies from behind a small child’s ears.

J.K. Simmons plays a bald cop, replacing Lance Henriksen who played a bald cop in the original film.

We see the Golden Gate Bridge destroyed in a tsunami of pixels. That’s not something I’ve seen in the cinema since Dwayne Johnson’s disaster movie San Andreas (2015) appeared last month.

Where the first two films arrogantly smashed their way into cinemas, this shuffles on with an apologetic air and tries to pander to the audience. And no-one likes a needy and pathetic kiss ass.

The Terminator (1984) was a ferocious sci-fi thriller and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was an SFX action spectacular.

Officially referred to as a reset not a reboot or a sequel, this film ejects Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Terminator Salvation (2009) form the canon. There was also a TV spin off show.

Both benefitted from James Cameron’s extraordinary storytelling but we have no such master-craftsman here. At one point the director is really confused and riffs on Cameron’s navy SEALs in space shoot ’em up Aliens (1986).

There’s lots of humour but little that’s funny, just a lot of knowing winks to the first film which may confuse anyone not familiar with the first film, made thirty years ago.

Skeletal robots are frequently walking out of exploding walls of fire.

Lines cherished in geekdom such as ‘I’ll be back’ and ‘Come with me if you want to live’ are delivered and followed by a pregnant pause, presumably for the audience to register and laugh.

But if this is your first Terminator film, it will be just a weirdly delivered line of no particular relevance.

It all makes little sense and by halfway through I didn’t care if the machines and Skynet won.

★☆☆☆☆

Magic Mike XXL

Director: Gregory Jacobs (2015)

The lord of the lap-dance returns in this sequel about sweet-natured strippers on the slide.

Buff, dim and sensitive, ‘Magic’ Mike (Channing Tatum) leaves his day job behind to re-join his dream boys: Ken, Big Dick Richie, Tarzan and Tito. (Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez).

Matthew McConaughey starred in Magic Mike (2012) but presumably now is too expensive or serious with his post-Oscar win credibility to appear, though his character of Dallas is often referred to.

With abs, pecs, biceps, baby oil and gold lame hot pants, the ageing entertainers fulfil the fantasies of their female fans – while yearning for emotional commitment in their private lives.

Recognising they’re getting too old for the bump and grind game, the boys take a road trip to one last performance to bow out in style.

En route to a stripping convention they lose costumes, a truck and a member, leaving them little time to put a new routine together.

Tatum is engaging and charming, a fine actor and a great dancer and holds the film together. The scene where he rediscovers his love for dance is a joy. The team are likeable and engaging and share a warm chemistry.

But the script isn’t as progressive as it strangely imagines itself to be, reducing the women to dollar-throwing sexual harpies who exist to show how kind, caring and sexy our heroes are.

Though there’s a lot of discussion about how women should be appreciated, celebrated and treated as be queens, one dancer describes his perfect woman as a glass slipper, which in context sounds extremely uncomfortable.

The notable female characters are played with conviction by Jada Pinkett Smith, Amber Heard and Andie MacDowell.

Pinkett Smith in particular gives a barnstorming performance – but in a role which is unnecessary and slows down the film. Written as man, her plot points could easily have been folded into the Andre character (Donald Glover).

With a loose-limbed improvisational feel Magic Mike starts strongly but there’s too long a tease for a disappointingly limp finale. Without a competitive element to the convention there is no conflict and no tension.

Plus the dance routines are underwhelming. Although the final dance is concerned with what the performance means to Mike, the success of the scene for we the audience depends on us believing Tatum is busting his own moves.

Now I don’t believe a dance double is employed, especially as the earlier scenes go to great pains to show us what a prime mover he is.

But not only is Tatum forced into a face-obscuring mask and hat, the awkward framing and rapid editing conspire to sow doubt in our mind as to who is really dancing.

This undermines the dramatic thrust of the scene and the resolution of the story.

Both editing and cinematography are by film-maker Steven Soderbergh, who really ought to know better.

His fingerprints are all over this film: such as the casting of McDowell who played a significant role in his breakout hit Sex, Lies And Videotape (1989). The shot of Mike watching fireworks weakly echoes the ending of Ocean’s Eleven (2001).

As director Jacobs is better known as producer than a director, it’s tempting to think Soderbergh had far more influence over the directorial vision of this film than we’re being told.

Tatum above anyone comes out in credit and manages to hold onto his dignity while wearing nothing but a silver G string which – take my word for it – is far more difficult than it sounds.

★★☆☆☆