The words Magic Mike may conjure up images of sweaty, sculpted, undulating men, dancing for hoards of screaming women, but there has always been a backdrop of economic reality looming over the fantasy world.

The unlikely franchise has explored the escalating devaluation of physical laborers, the suffocating effects of the college industrial complex, predatory loan businesses, recession and even COVID-19, which has effectively destroyed Mike Lane’s furniture business in this latest film.

When we re-meet Channing Tatum’s gentle hunk in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” he’s bartending at parties for the very rich in Miami. The gig could be worse, but though he doesn’t quite say it, the implication is that he’s aged out of dancing. He has to seriously think about it when his wealthy employer offers him $6,000 for a dance later that evening.

Asking why sequels exist doesn’t usually produce satisfying answers, but “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is a film that was born backwards, a fit of inspiration from Steven Soderbergh after seeing what Tatum had done with Magic Mike Live. The Las Vegas stage show, inspired by the first two movies, is described on its website as “an unforgettably fun night of sizzling, 360-degree entertainment,” “hot,” “hilarious.”

But “Last Dance” is not quite any of those things and perhaps might even annoy some of its most enthusiastic fans — the ones who simply want to holler at the six-packs in front of them. Because this film is that thing that many sequels promise but don’t deliver on: It’s both a true evolution and a conclusion.

In “Last Dance,” Soderbergh gives Mike a wealthy benefactor, in the form of the operatically named Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek) who is in the midst of a messy divorce from an obscenely successful media mogul and looking to shake things up.

After an acrobatic, but fully clothed, encounter with Mike, she decides to whisk him away to London, dress him up and put him in charge of staging a show that promises to make its audiences feel the way she did the night she met Mike.

If there is a quibble, it’s that Hayek and Tatum don’t quite inspire the will-they-won’t-they tension that the movie seems to be asking of them. They work well together when they’re working together, but the romantic chemistry is a bit lacking.

Even so, Mike manages to wrest an inspired dance in the rain out of the idea of them (his co-dancer is Kylie Shea) that pays homages to classic movie musicals.

This story is told like a fairy tale, or a poetically composed school paper from a particularly precocious student, with a silky voiced young narrator telling us about Mike’s woes and the waning significance of dance in the culture. She’s not just a disembodied voice, but an important character the story reveals later. But it’s a lovely little flourish in Mike’s journey.

“Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” a Warner Bros. release, is rated R for “sexual material and language.” Running time: 112 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.