X2 (2003) I wish I didn't recommend the first one Superhero movies don't seem to have a lot of staying power for me these days. I liked X-Men at the time, but it feels more like half a movie than ever now, a lot of the effects look cheap, and several seasons of Farscape have given me more appreciation than ever for how good romances can be in a genre framework, especially if there's some chemistry between the players and some thought put into the way things play out. In other words, holy crap, did the Wolverine/Cyclops/Jean Grey love triangle suck. Beyond that, it was basically a meet-and-greet with a thin plot tacked on about Magneto's mutantifier device, and a pretty mediocre movie. Even Spider-Man - arguably the new superhero movie standard - has lost a lot of its sheen due to its idiot villain and that appallingly shameless sop to "the spirit of New York", though I like it a lot more than not and stand by my recommendation. So, take these comments into consideration when I set myself up for possibly another years-delayed self-delivered smack to the head, because I'm recommending this too. Even though it's been four years since the first movie (I can't believe it took them four years! See also The Matrix ), this might take place only weeks or months afterward. The first thing we see is an action scene of such ass-kickery that it's a bit of a shame that the movie never gets back to that level, as the constantly teleporting Nightcrawler (Alan Cummings - and yes, the foley guys did work up a pretty good BAMF! for him) beating up a sizeable portion of the Secret Service, ultimately getting to the President himself. It's like when track one is the best song on an otherwise just pretty good CD. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has looked into how he might've gotten all that adamantium (the indestructible metal that exists only in the Marvel universe) welded to his skeleton, and has found nothing. Magneto (Ian McKellen) is still in his glass and plastic prison, and the shape-shifting Mystique (Rebecca Romjin-Stamos) is dividing her time between scheming on a way to get him out, and impersonating a senator that died in the first movie. Back at the mutant school run by Prof. X (Patrick Stewart), things are proceeding normally...until a scheming black-ops-type military guy who just had to be named Stryker (Brian Cox) exercises his influence and somehow gets the President to sign off on a violent raid on the X-school. All the players from part 1 that survived - that is, everybody but the pathetic Toad and the mildly monstrous Sabretooth - is back, along with (in varying degrees) a lot of new mutants. Most prominent is Nightcrawler (with this many running around, it's probably a good idea to mostly focus on just one of them), though we also get a young Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) - who does little beyond his slight romance of Rogue (Anna Paquin) - Pyro (Aaron Stanford), who does his best to give mutants a bad name, and Deathstryke (Kelly Hu), who I've never heard of, who basically seems like a dainty female version of Wolverine. Elsewhere, if you're sharp-eyed (and way more knowledgeable about the Marvel universe than I am), you can spot...hell, I wouldn't know where to start. I recognized Colossus. Notice how all these mutants have cool powers that come in handy during fights? I bet the ones with really lame powers (super pottery repair, amazing Monopoly mastery) were too embarrassed to come forward. Jackman still has the worst hair since Earthwoman Hostage #2 in Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. Stewart looks way, way more alive here than he did in Star Trek: Insurrection. Halle Barry returns as Storm, and surprisingly her role is still fairly small, despite the huge steps forward her career's taken since 1999. Really, everybody's role here is small, except arguably Jackman's. Romjin-Stamos endures the five-hour full-body makeup endurance test again, seeming glad to be able to perform without it in one scene, but doing all right when she's blue and scaly too. McKellen is fine as Magneto, though supervillains rarely ever seem to have a lot going on character-wise and this is no exception. There's more plot than in the first movie, and that's a plus. It still kind of comes down to "Magneto has a device that will destroy humanity!" at the end, but it's a fun trip getting there, especially Magneto's prison break. The effects are much better than in the first movie, and the action scenes are fun and quite a bit more violent. This is also a plus. Foot-long metal claws that never hurt anybody are lame, and here, they hurt and even kill people! Cyclops is still kind of useless, Storm has some fun creating tornadoes to contend with fighter jets (I'm surprised that a movie which plays the US military as villains is doing so well right now), Jean Grey throws things around, and Wolverine badly hurts anybody dumb enough to pick a fight with him. He's still more or less the X-Men's "human" center, the one the audience can most easily identify with. Even the love triangle, given a nominal bit of revival here (still no chemistry, still no thought into taking it somewhere interesting) is apparently irreversibly resolved, in probably the best way it could've been given how little it had going for it. The thing is, pedestrian shit like love triangles is not the kind of thing I want to see superheroes doing. If I wanted to see that, I'd rent a Gary Marshall movie. I want to see what makes mutants mutants, and how their lives are different from ours. I want to know what they have to eat in order to keep healing from any injury, or shoot lasers from their eyes. I want to know how badly it hurts for Colossus to grow and shed metal scales at will - that's gotta be like passing a kidney stone, but about a million times worse. I liked how Iceman was able to casually, instantly refrigerate a lukewarm drink for Wolverine, with nothing more than a gesture to prompt him - with powers like these being a major aspect of their lives, I want to see mutants be mutants, not slaves to a screenplay rooted too firmly in the mundane. That's one of the many areas where this sequel improves upon the original, and I think for this to be a continuing trend it's probably the one that needs the most attention in an X3. There are a lot of little things I don't understand about this movie. I don't know who paid for the X-Men's super-jet, who built it (self-repairing!), or even really what they need it for or why it has to be that big. Stryker's mind-control of the mutants is left kind of vague - do they all have such spots on the backs of their necks? - and I don't know how he managed to pull that with Nightcrawler if he can constantly teleport away. For that matter, I'm not really clear on how Stryker convinced the President to sign off on a military raid on a school with lots of children in it, complete with all the violence necessary to subdue said children. Maybe I wasn't paying attention, or maybe these are things only longtime fans of the comic can answer - I hope it was the former. Marvel Comics seemed to have nothing in the way of movie adaptations until the last few years, and now they're everywhere. This isn't the best - Spider-Man still holds that title, much as I might find more fault with it now - but it's one of the better ones, and I hope it bodes well for this to become a pretty good franchise, though I wouldn't bet on it. Lots of stars, lots of paychecks, lots of egos, lots of lawyers. BACK TO THE X's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE