Rating: 7.5/10
Review date: May 1, 2003
The X-Men movie franchise continues with a second installment that pick up right after the end of the first movie where Magneto is put in a plastic prison after his failed attempt to turn the inhabitants of New York into mutants. He is then “forced” into an unlikely alliance with the X-Men after a failed assassination attempt at the U.S. President which resulted in the authorization of a General William Stryker to exterminate all mutants once and for all.
This is quite a good movie overall which build up a lot from the first X-Men back in 2000. More characters are introduced this time round such as Nightcrawler (love the special effect reserved for this particular mutant), Pyro, Iceman and Lady Deathstrike (careful with those claws!) aside from the existing ones. Not only that, some hints to future mutants who might appear in future sequels such as Colossus and Jubilee (I was kind of disappointed due to the absence of Gambit).
I really appreciate that much emphasis was placed on the characters, thus shedding more light to their background/abilities, how they interact to each other and humans in general. Some examples to note are Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) who is quite central to the plot this time around and shows off her morphing abilities quite a few times. Rogue (Anna Paquin) was also given more time on screen although it mostly emphasize on how she interacts with other mutants given her unfortunate abilities. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) took the central role here as the main storyline also revolves around how he becomes a mutant and such.
However, some characters are left out such as Cyclops (James Marsden) who were given very little sense and disappears halfway through the movie, only to reappear again nearing the end.
Speaking of which, I think Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) should have been given more opportunity to show off her abilities (man, I just love those claws). The impression that I have from her is that she is just put there to look cool until her final showdown with Wolverine. This reminds me to mention that I also feel her battle with Wolverine is a bit too short and it should have been prolonged considerably with more cool moves to make it more intense (hey that’s just me).
X-Men 2 is a worthy follow-up which actually surpass that of the first movie with more character developments, more actions and some humorous lines dropped all over the place. However, I just feel that the movie is not as good as expected and I’ve never been a fan of the X-Men which might also be the reason why I don’t give it a higher rating. It is certainly enough to keep me glued to the movie and keeping my interest up until the inevitably X-Men 3 certain to be coming since they let a few loose threads hanging which I hope will be solved in the next sequel.
Memorable quote: “Sometimes the mind needs to discover things by itself.”
-Patrick Stewart as Professor X-
(c) Martin Taidy 2003