**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, Famke Jansen, Brian Cox, Alan Cumming, Halle Berry, James Marsden, Anna Paquin, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Bruce Davison, Kelly Hu, Peter Wingfield, and Shawn Ashmore
Directed by Bryan Singer & written by Singer, Michael Dougherty, Daniel P. Harris, David Hayter, and Zak Penn, from the Marvel Comic created by Stan Lee, with John Byrne, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Jack Kirby, and Len Wein
2003 PG13
Maybe the big draw for the X-Men was never really their super powers, but the fact that they are a society of outcasts. Anyone who has ever feel alienated—and I’m sure that’s most people—would love to stumble across a group where your flaws are not just accepted but celebrated, and seen not as flaws at all but what makes you special. This is an especially inviting idea for children and young people, who are always being picked on for being too fat, too skinny, too ugly, too pale, too dark, too girly, too manly, or in my case, several of the above. What a thrill to find a place where everything that makes you an outcast is revealed to actually make you superior to everyone who has cast you out.
The “X-Men” movie from 2000 and its sequel “X2: X-Men United” have really sought to make something out of this predicament. Much screen-time is devoted to the angst of these men and women with special powers, and even more to the growing national dilemma about what is to be done with all these mutants. Some pressure groups, afraid of the mutants, want them federally registered, if not quarantined or wiped out, while the mutants themselves strive not to be disenfranchised. If anyone qualifies as “differently abled,” the X-Men certainly do, and it’s surprising that there’s no ACLU-style organization in the movie arguing that the term “mutant” is derogatory. God bless the movies for trying, but what we get for their efforts is awkward, heavy-handed, and a little too simplistic. A friend of mine keeps telling me that 2000’s “X-Men” is a metaphor for Hitler’s final solution, but in 2002 there were no less than four movies about the real Holocaust (“The Pianist,” “Nowhere in Africa,” “Invincible,” and “The Grey Zone”), two of them Oscar-winners, and all with more to say.
I’ve only seen “X-Men” cut-up for television and therefore can’t review it properly, but what I did see didn’t leave much of an impression. That movie is almost all back-story, told while the good mutants make their way to Charles Xavier’s X-Men school, with a climax tacked on at the end. There’s a theory that most of the unnecessary characters in “The Iliad” and “The Song of Roland” are only present because their descendents are part of the target audience, and would be disappointed if they didn’t hear the names of their ancestors. To please fans of the comic book, “X-Men” is similarly piled down with characters, whose appearances and superpowers are pretty easy to keep straight but whose personalities are more evasive.
“X2” is a smoother, slicker ride, more comfortable with itself, with someone or something blowing up every five or six minutes. The movie begins with blue-skinned Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) trying to assassinate the President of the United States with a knife that reads “mutant freedom now!” The President, who survives the encounter, looks like a cross between George W. Bush and Tom Wilkinson, and is shaken to the point of giving more power than he ought to a grim colonel named Stryker (Brian Cox of “25th Hour”). Soldiers are seldom the good guys in movies like this and Stryker is no exception.
The good mutants are led by wheelchair-bound telepath Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), who still models his mutant academy on an Edwardian prep school. He is joined by the comic world’s favorite anti-hero, the scowling and moody Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who as of late has been investigating his own mysterious past. Wolverine cannot remember the first twenty-five or so years of his life, but clues lead him to a frozen research facility and much brooding. The bad mutants are led by Magneto (Sir Ian McKellan), who is still locked away in a plastic prison where his metal-wielding powers are useless. Both sides are perplexed by Nightcrawler’s thwarted attack on the President, and both are soon trying to beat Stryker to finding him.
Stryker, who has no relation to Captain Ted Stryker of the “Airplane!” movies, seems to have a shared past with the good mutants, the bad mutants, and Wolverine. This leads to a classic action movie exchange of dialogue, in which Wolverine asks “who are you?” and Stryker very suggestively replies “you don’t remember me, do you?” Just once I’d like to hear the good guy respond to that with “no, of course I don’t remember you, that’s why I asked.”
Page two of "X2: X-Men United." Back to home.