Magic Mike was one of the great surprises in 2010s cinema: a shaggy tale of male strippers starring an army of beefcake with limited (at best) acting skills that turned out to be a piercing, hurtfully insightful examination of personal financial stability in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It is a party movie only if you have unusually bad taste in parties. So on the face of it, it makes sense that the film would kick off a sequel that would be closer to what was promised the first time, and Magic Mike XXL can certainly claim this for itself: it does not have an opinion on the state of the national or world economies. Your mileage may vary on whether this is to be praised or not.

It's adorably shaggy, at any rate. This is a particularly chill hang-out film, content to sit around enjoying the characters as they bullshit and make ambling plans to leave Miami for a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, SC, and it's to the absolute credit of everybody involved that not one person between writer Reid Carolin, director Gregory Jacobs, and producer-star Channing Tatum, director Gregory Jacobs, nor anyone else involved in making the thing, seems to have labored under the illusion that "stripper convention" was anything but an enormously silly idea. It's a movie all about having a good time and not thinking too hard about it, whether that's cracking dirty jokes with your guy buddies, or cracking dirty jokes with your gal buddies, as the film starts to shift POV smoothly and pleasantly from the strippers to their eager female clientele (this is, among its charms, 2015's most unfussily post-gender, post-sexuality wide release movie).

It's endlessly friendly, though perhaps surprisingly, given how transparently it aims to be the more partying, goofy half of the Magic Mike dyad, it's considerably less erotically charged, and less invested in ogling the male bodies onscreen, than its sociopolitically-minded predecessor. This is a bubbly vacation film, not a sweaty sexploitation picture, and that works out awfully well for it. There's a loose, appealing quality to how it feels tossed together, with frayed music cues trailing into each other, the fragments of choreography and unrushed lingering on reaction shots in Steven Soderbergh's editing (the first time he's cut a movie without directing it) all giving it the feeling of a particularly well-heeled home movie. And it's hard not to be intoxicated by the bright colors in Soderbergh's cinematography (the first time he's shot a movie without directing it), resembling a sun-tan lotion bottle.

The very real downside to all this is that it's a singularly anti-urgent movie, and has a tendency to meander in ways that become somewhat annoying: not one scene in the second half doesn't go on beyond its natural expiration point, even the film's most thoroughly engaging scene, which finds Andie MacDowell leading a bevy of middle-aged women enjoying the sight of strippers accidentally showing up on their doorstep. It's a shapeless film, and while that's enjoyable for a while, by the third time Jada Pinkett Smith delivers essentially the same monologue in essentially the same passionate tones, or any time Amber Heard appears as the completely vacant romantic lead, it's hard not to wish that there was maybe just a little less hanging out, and a little more nudging things along.