Magic Mike, Seven magazine review McConaughey plays Dallas, the owner of a male strip club in Tampa, and beneath his tilted cowboy hat and oily mop of curls sit a pair of emotionless eyes, perpetually swivelling to count the cash. To the energetic troupe of younger men who prance and hip-pump behind him, he's either a slick business model or an example of where your soul can go to die. Either way, Dallas - whose speeches mix preacherly rhythms with ample profanity - is, in his deliciously repellent style, quite a scene-stealer. Its hero is Mike (Channing Tatum), a square-jawed, self-sufficient young man who regards stripping as just one of many possible jobs: his dream is to produce custom-made furniture, but bank managers regard him and his stacks of sweaty cash with suspicion. He takes a shambling, good-looking 19-year-old called Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing, and introduces him to the strip club and the stage. Adam, who is both a bit dim and a natural waster, feels he has found paradise in the plentiful opportunities to indulge in casual sex and drugs which his new profession offers him. His older sister Brooke (Cody Horn), who is better and smarter, disagrees. The frequent glimpses of life inside the strip club are simultaneously funny and depressing: there one can see muscled-up men preening and preparing with all the narcissistic intensity that was once the preserve of female exotic dancers. Their hectically silly, lewd performances, which drive the crowds of assembled young women wild, may have a more straightforwardly comic effect on a cinema audience: they seem to confuse athleticism and roaring self-adoration with sex appeal. The plot of Soderbergh's film is a straightforward soap-opera stroll down a path of disillusion, but it is strong on atmosphere. Without ever hectoring, it exposes how Mike (likeably portrayed by Tatum) slowly realises he is being netted in a dead-end lifestyle. As he turns 30, the excuses of a young man having a hedonistic blast begin to seem exhausted, and the club offers him attention without status. The tipping point comes when he realises that a woman he has been seeing casually is in fact engaged, and he is her dirty little secret, in a reversal of how some men have traditionally approached female strippers. "I'm not what I do," he pleads, but this film - socially conservative at heart, for all its reckless exposure up front - suggests that before long, he will become exactly what he does, and it's time to get out.