La Bare, the male strip club that inspired Magic Mike, is the focus of Joe Manganiello’s breezy new documentary, which is fitting as Manganiello played “Big Dick Richie” in Steven Soderberg’s quirky 2010 spin on the biz. It’s also Manganiello’s first time behind the lens, and while the film is confidently shot and full of pomp and piss, it hardly gets underneath the well-oiled surface.
The legendary Dallas hotspot of the title has long roots reaching back into the ’70s. You can think of it as the Club 54 for ogling beefcakes—the gold standard of its time—and then, as the owner tells it, after 9/11, the business dried up and the establishment languished. Manganiello doesn’t dig so much into the extenuating circumstances or why the notorious American tragedy had such an impact—he’s more focused on the now and the wow and quickly jumps to happier times after an Eastern European emigre named Alex comes in and reboots the club by cleaning it up and bringing in a Las Vegas choreographer. Continue reading
Pearce plays the barely named Eric, an aloof loner with an ostensible military background. The film opens with the tacit protagonist making a pit stop at an isolated karaoke bar (which looks more like a grimy torture chamber from a “Saw” movie than a place of merriment) for some water and a bite when a speeding truck laden with unsavory lads crashes, and its occupants quickly disembark and carjack Eric’s sleek, lean coupe. That’s it – from there on out, Eric will stop at nothing to reclaim his car. It’s a straight-up one-noter like “Duel,” propelled by Eric’s simmering resolve and the ever pungent question as to what else has to be in that car to make Eric want it that bad. 
The hook has three computer nerds on a cross-country trip to take the lone female, Hayley (Olivia Cooke of “Bates Hotel”) to a California tech school. One of the guys, Nic (Brenton Thwaites, most recently in “Maleficent”) is her beau and on crutches, the result of some sort of poorly explained disease or condition. The relationship is strained, not only because of looming long distance and physical barriers but because Hayley is defecting from MIT, where Nic and Jonah (Beau Knapp) remain. The two lads are also engaged in a hacking war with an online entity known as Nomad. Nomad’s bona fide; he can hack into a security cam and send the trio a pic of their dusty station wagon as it heads through the plains, or take over one of their laptops. Finally, the two get a bead on Nomad somewhere in Nevada and they decide to take a detour. It’s also where the boldness of “The Signal” starts to fade. 
Besides being set in a harsh future where the threads of humanity claw and scrape to hang on, the two films boast multiple Toms. In “Oblivion” his Jack Harper is one of two human agents on a toxic Earth running seawater siphons to feed the rest of humanity on a housing platform in the near atmosphere (there’s more to it than that, and it’s a worthy watch) before coming shockingly face to face with another Jack Harper. In “Tomorrow,” Cruise is Major Cage, a cocksure military PR man who gets placed frontline in the battle against an invading alien species sweeping through Europe and poised to eradicate all of mankind – and he can rise from the dead. Cage can’t stomach the sight of blood and has never seen combat, but he gets demoted to private and injected into a troop of misfits as presumed fodder for the invading Mimics, which look like giant angry dust bunnies with metallic tentacles and a lion-like mug, when they take the beaches of Normandy. That presumption proves correct – initially – but after Cage gets laid to waste by an angry Alpha Mimic, he’s somehow imbued with the ability to pop back to life 24 hours before his expiration, or something like that. 
For What it's Worth 