RSS or
Email.
Related Reviews
Halle Berry
-
Perfect Stranger (2007)
-
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
-
Robots (2005)
-
Catwoman (2004)
-
Gothika (2003)
-
Die Another Day (2002)
-
Bulworth (1998)
-
Monster's Ball (2001)
Hugh Jackman
-
The Fountain (2006)
-
Happy Feet (2006)
-
Flushed Away (2006)
-
The Prestige (2006)
-
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
-
Van Helsing (2004)
Famke Janssen
Bryan Singer
Patrick Stewart
Ian McKellen
X2 (X-Men 2)
(2003)
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
--Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice," 1920.
Frost's literal-figurative examination of human existence and apocalypse seems aptly, if oddly, fitted to the superhero epic X2, Bryan Singer's hotly anticipated sequel to 2000's X-Men. Like most superhero tales, X2 takes us to the brink of destruction so that heroes can "save the world." X2 also plays with opposed pairs, including the mutants "Iceman" and "Pyro." Perhaps most importantly, X2 advances Singer's metaphorical portrait of modern America as once more on a cusp of major social change; with this stress come fear, hatred, distrust, and violence. Indeed, X2 runs hot and cold, but mostly satisfies with its "upgraded" science-fiction razzle-dazzle.
X2 picks up where the first film left off, though one needn't have seen the first film to pick up the plot. According to X-Men lore, elaborated on in hundreds of Marvel comics since 1963, the human species has taken a genetic leap to the next evolutionary level. The minority wave of humans who have evolved, the mutants, face a McCarthy-esque climate. The fearful and resentful are represented in the first film by Bruce Davison's Senator Robert Kelly (who appears in a different "form" here) and, in X2, by Brian Cox's Gen. William Stryker, a more serious variation on Gen. Jack D. Ripper.
Stryker, for reasons which turn out to be more personal than political, wants to wipe out all of the mutants. From the halls of power, Stryker arranges for a surgical strike on Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, the euphemistically named boarding school for mutants run by the powerful psychic Professor X (Patrick Stewart). There, in relative safety, live mutants old and young, among them X's psychic protégé Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), her heat-ray-eyed boyfriend Cyclops (James Marsden), and weather-controlling Storm (Halle Berry). The younger crew includes superpower-conduit Rogue (Anna Paquin), Rogue's boyfriend Iceman--a.k.a. Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore)--and Pyro, now played by Aaron Stanford (Tadpole).
The star of the show, as before, is Hugh Jackman's grumpy and mysterious Wolverine (real name: Logan), whose remarkable healing powers allow him to endure an adamantium skeleton which spontaneously shoots lengthy claws from his knuckles (look, I told you it was a mutant superhero movie). At some point, some sinister scientist implanted this skeleton in Logan's body without his consent, and when the film begins, Logan is pursuing the truth he knows is out there.
Further complicating matters is a morally suspect shadow group of mutants, led by Professor X's friend-gone-bad Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen). It's not giving much away to let on that Magneto escapes his plastic prison (erected to hold the metal-controlling mutant in the first film) and raises a ruckus. X2 allows Magneto and his crew--including Rebecca Romijn-Stamos's Mystique--to play both sides of the fence--hence the advertising subtitle "X-Men United"--for the common cause of saving all mutants from an ignominious demise. Stryker's plan is to harness the power of Professor X's Cerebro mind machine to implode every dirty mutant on the globe, inverting Magneto's "kill all humans" goal from the first film.
From the winking "X" in the opening 20th Century Fox logo, X2 is a witty and eye-popping adventure with generous portions of action. Singer never tops the set piece which opens the film, an elaborate White House break-in by the ambiguous, blue, tattooed, long-tailed, German-accented, teleporting mutant Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), but not for lack of trying with plenty of special effects-laden battles. Though the supersized X2 is an even more plot-driven installment than X-Men's relatively lean origin story, Singer and an expanded team of screenwriters even find room for bits of subtle humor, like Mystique and Magneto cattily commiserating--on an airplane full of uneasy mutants--like kids at the back of a classroom.
Such moments also feed into the unavoidable gay subtext of the film. Though the overt romantic heat continues to be heterosexual, Singer continues to play the mutant conflict with humans as an allegory for the gay experience. X2 continues the first film's skewering of a conservative political mindset positioned against gay civil rights. Professor X tells Stryker, at one point, "Mutation is not a disease," while in an extended sequence, Bobby Drake must come out to his parents (his overcompensating mother asks, "So when did you first know you were a--?" and "Have you tried...not being a mutant?"). Singer, who is gay, also prominently casts openly gay actors Cumming and McKellen, whose Magneto may well have been more than friends with Professor X in the past.
While certainly the sort of must-see summer-movie entertainment which delivers one's money's worth of spectacle, sass, and surprise, X2 has its failings. After galloping out of the gate, X2 drags in its final stretches and isn't always as focused or coherent as the first film (ground rules are never adequately established for mutant mind-control, for instance). Though the crack cast is mostly delightful, Cumming overplays Nightcrawler, and Marsden drops the ball in a climactic bit of hideous overacting. Still, with dozens of interesting characters to service, X2 does its clever best to deliver a satisfying episode, and it's no small measure of the sequel's success that it leaves one longing to see what happens in the next exciting chapter.
Permalink