There’s an early scene in “Magic Mike XXL” that hints at what this much ballyhooed sequel woulda, coulda, shoulda been.

Mike Lane, played by the well-nigh irresistible Channing Tatum, is alone in his furniture workshop. As he saws, measures and sands, the beat of the music he’s listening to starts to transport him. He can’t stop himself: He begins to dance, all around the shop, over and under the tools, a guy who just can’t keep those limbs from moving.

Tatum’s a great dancer and a wonderfully physical actor. We’d watch him do this all night. But we don’t get to.

Instead, we get almost two hours of often rambling setup, finally leading to a long-awaited climax when Tatum, fellow chiseled stud Matt Bomer and their buff male stripper cohorts take the stage to bump, hump, grind and swivel tirelessly as gleeful women rain dollar bills onto their oiled skin. Yes, we admire this tirelessness. But is it treasonous to suggest that eventually it becomes tireSOME, too?

Those who fondly remember the original “Magic Mike” will be sad to realize that Matthew “Alright Alright Alright” McConaughey is missing this time around. So is director Steven Soderbergh, though he’s back as cinematographer and editor; his associate Gregory Jacobs has taken the reins. What’s most obviously missing in this sequel, though, is a real plot. What there is can be summed up in five words: road trip to stripper convention. Or maybe six: LONG road trip to stripper convention.

We begin three years after Mike traded the stripper life for his long-held dream of setting up his own custom furniture company. It’s not going as well as he’d planned.

Suddenly, Mike gets a call. It’s a ruse, but it brings him back to his old buddies from the Kings of Tampa, planning one last big stab at glory before retiring their act at the convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

One last show: Hardly an original premise. There are moments of fun. But too often, the gang’s stops on the way to the contest – sort of a male stripper-themed “Little Miss Sunshine,” when you think about it – start well and then just go on forever. This is true of a visit to a private Savannah strip club, whose owner, Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith) has an unresolved past with Mike.

Rome and Mike? The idea is intriguing. But we never learn much about what happened. Things get sewn up quickly, and we move on. The same happens with the oddly unsatisfying (for us) relationship Mike strikes up with a pretty photographer (Amber Heard) he meets one night. We’d like to know more; she’s still there at the end of the movie, and we don’t know why.

But maybe all that’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is the giant show at the end, where each man gets his moment to shine, though frankly we’d have been happy just to fast-forward to Tatum.

But even when the star takes the stage, some of us might wish he’d do a little less, uh, simulating, and a little more actual dancing.

This photo provided by Warner Bros. Pictures shows, Jada Pinkett Smith, left, as Rome, and Channing Tatum as Mike in Warner Bros. Pictures’, “Magic Mike XXL,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. The movie releases in U.S. theaters on July 1, 2015. (Claudette Barius/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

Claudette Barius