Whatever Tatum knows about working-class ambition and exploitation (personal or Hollywood style) gets lost in director Steven Soderbergh’s affectless look at Mike Lane (Tatum), a multitasking, self-described entrepreneur (“It’s French,” he says) who spends most of his time humping-and-grinding at Tampa’s Xquisite Club that specializes in male strip shows for female customers.

Soderbergh emphasizes the strip show, intro’d by club owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), a lizardy, leathery All-American huckster. But Soderbergh isn’t interested in eroticism. The sex-as-labor theme is itself exploited and trivialized in the Xquisite performances. Soderbergh shoots the routines (“It’s Raining Men” features the troupe in raincoats, suggestively stroking umbrellas) with the same slicked-up stylization that made Flashdance so phony–and yet made it a hit that set the sentimental template for the next several generations’ fuzzy ideas about egoism and success.

Magic Mike extends that sex/success fantasy with over-seriousness, misrepresenting Mike’s peculiar route toward his goal of making custom-designed furniture! If anything can be said with certainty in this life it’s that people who want to make furniture don’t become sex-workers. That term fits Soderbergh’s low-level shots of dollar-bills-in-thongs–a laughable Bresson affectation. But Magic Mike isn’t an analysis of leisure-as-work like Godard cinched in his capitalism/prostitution allegories A Married Woman or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her(which were also insightful essays on contemporary Paris). Soderbergh slogs through backstage clichés: Mike struggling against a status-rigged banking system and his doomed mentoring of Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a naïve, unmotivated, emotionally unstable 19-year-old spoiling to be despoiled.

While avoiding the overblown existentialism of P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Soderbergh’s still arty. His oblique close-up of a dancer using a vacuum penis-pump pretends to be austere but it’s really just another example of Soderbergh’s strange detachment: he’s always distant from his subjects yet gives no perspective. Mike’s attraction to Adam’s motherly sister Brooke (Cody Horn) is as clichéd as the bits from Flashdance, 42nd Street, Showgirls and Saturday Night Fever although Soderbergh avoids their emotional payoffs. His drabness prevents dramatic satisfaction which ultimately prevents comprehension.

In Magic Mike, Channing Tatum trades-in his experience as stripper, dancer, actor for Hollywood glibness. Soderbergh seems uninterested in contemplating male sexuality (Tatum’s body) or the work of performance and public interaction–the things Ice Cube got superlatively right in his 1998 female-stripper movie The Player’s Club. This film is even more aggressively hetero. Among the gallery of specimen from pretty-boy Pettyfer to studly Joe Manganiello and the briefly exoticized Adam Rodriguez, Tatum’s charismatic athleticism is the most inviting. He’s open and energetic unlike his gloomy, introspective muse-characterizations for the urban poet Dito Montiel, yet Soderbergh’s disingenuousness encourages the self-defeating (so far) Hollywood stardom Tatum escaped his roots to accept.

Tatum’s Southern white boy essence and dancer’s eagerness could provide insight about the discipline of break-dancing culture, the working-class ambition and sexual currency of his pre-Hollywood years. But Mike’s glib soliloquies (“I’m not my goddam job!”) offer only recession-ready delusions. So does McConaghay’s impresario, a decadent business figure whose Dennis Hopper-craziness (“Fuck that mirror like you mean it!”) contrasts Mike’s magical innocence. Like the working-class slugs in Soderbergh’s 2005 abomination Bubble, all these characters are shallow. They strip to reveal nothing–despite Tatum’s promise of new physical truths. Dumb hunk stereotype confirmed.

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Hill) in 21 Jump Street.

The duo have not outgrown their adolescent rivalry or immature sense of amusement that began in high school. Seven years later (after a police academy training session ridiculously scored to The Clash’s version of Junior Murvin’s reggae classic “Police and Thieves”), they’re sent back to high school as undercover cops. Less audience representatives than pandering role models, they want moviegoers to laugh at class clowns and cop clowns.

This nonsense comes from rebooting the 1980s TV series 21 Jump Street, minus the cop-drama gravitas. Ironically, it exhibits the lowbrow humor currently found on both network and cable TV shows—forms geared to the juvenile taste of 12-year-old boys, the gullible demographic desperately sought after by advertisers. Adults now embrace their
inner brat as a sign of cool, longing for the irresponsibility of childishness. They accept TV mediocrity and smuttiness in movies like Knocked Up, The Hangover and Bridesmaids. The downward spiral continues with 21 Jump Street.

Refashioning TV junk as if it were enriched our cultural heritage, Hollywood diminishes it. As that misappropriated reggae song demonstrates, any possibility that pop culture can address socially, morally, politically important experience is denied. 21 Jump Street’s idiocy is personified in Tatum’s tall-drink-ofretardation, Hill’s rotund schmuck (a role he should have outgrown after David Gordon Green’s The Sitter) and later in a cameo by Johnny Depp, star of the original TV series, who is only fooling himself if he thinks this meta-comic turn is equivalent to Marlon Brando spoofing Don Vito Corleone in The Freshman.

Consider: Brando seized the opportunity to comment upon The Godfather’s cultural phenomenon that proved less conscientious than he had hoped when signing on to its gangster-movie allegory for corporate greed. (Could even Brando’s genius have intuited that The Godfather would inspire a new cultural standard of thievery and ruthlessness that even politicians such as The Sopranos fans Bill and Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama would eventually endorse?)

Tatum, Hill and Depp are less conscientious stars; they simply overlook the consequences when trash ignores the crisis of police brutality—a problem producer Stephen J. Cannell had addressed in his exploitative TV mogul way by giving cop drama a hip-hop spin.

Now the spin is out of control. 21 Jump Street is aggressively stupid farce. Its directing team, Phil Lord and Chris
Miller, can’t cohere the tone of a single scene, jumping from teen sap to grossout humor almost schizophrenically. The relentless hodge-podge resembles a LMFAO music video—without the delirium that gives LMFAO their party-animal style. Frequent video game intertitles steal from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; dance scenes, stunt scenes and explosions are mistimed, while the overly violent shootouts imitate Pineapple Express.

This mess of dishonest intentions and cultural decline epitomizes the lack of sincerity and imagination now passing for entertainment. 21 Jump Street has gotten better reviews than Jack and Jill, probably because it has nothing to do with real experience; because it substitutes narrative development with explosions and uses dick jokes for the repressed tensions of male bonding, as in Tatum’s homoerotic puzzlement when Schmidt befriends a
narc played by Dave Franco.

Perhaps the lowest point is Jenks and Schmidt’s singsong
trivialization of the Miranda rights advisory; it’s insulting to current urban sensitivities and reveals Hollywood’s ongoing juvenile comedy phase to be mindlessly offensive. 21 Jump Street is so obtuse it’s as if the social satire of Hot Fuzz never happened.