Considering how high director Bryan Singer set the bar three years ago with his adaptation of the X-Men comic book series, it’s not surprising that subsequent live-action Marvel mayhem like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil haven’t topped it. Only Singer, it seems, could outdo Singer—and that’s just what he’s done with X2. Upping the ante in cast, plot, action, and effects, Singer serves up a movie that is everything a superhero sequel should be.
The film starts strong—with an exhilarating, brilliantly edited sequence involving a politically motivated attack on the President inside the White House—and stays in high gear throughout. When the X-Men find out the attack was carried out by a mutant, their search leads them to a certain devilish-looking teleporter that fans of the comic will know and love (especially when they see the makeup job on Alan Cumming). Meanwhile, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, considerably meaner than he was in the first film) is called upon first to babysit a pack of young mutants at Professor Charles Xavier’s school for “gifted youngsters,” then to defend them when the school comes under siege by soldiers led by William Stryker (Brian Cox), a military man whose hatred for mutants stems from a past that involves both Wolverine and Xavier (Patrick Stewart).
Unfortunately for our heroes, Stryker has discovered the existence of Xavier’s supercomputer Cerebro, thanks to the unwilling cooperation of the still-imprisoned Magneto (Ian McKellen). His plan is to use both Cerebro and Xavier for his own ends. To stop him, the X-Men find themselves in the awkward position of having to team up with Magneto and his shape-shifting sidekick Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). To some would-be X-Men—like Pyro (Aaron Stanford), whose temper is as fiery as his mutant power—Magneto’s mutant-supremacist ideology proves dangerously appealing.
To thicken this already dense plot, Singer continues the love triangle between Wolverine, Cyclops (James Marsden), and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), and throws in some young love between Rogue (Anna Paquin) and Bobby “Iceman” Drake (Shawn Ashmore). He even finds time for a few cameos from other characters adapted from the X-Men comics and their numerous spinoffs. (One of these is Lady Deathstrike, a lithe assassin whose powers have a lot in common with Wolverine’s.) Like its predecessor, the film constantly rewards knowledge of the comics without requiring it (although knowledge of the first film is pretty much mandatory). The lone exception to this rule is the ending, a tantalizing hint of things to come that won’t make much sense to anyone who isn’t familiar with a particular story arc from the comics.
Nevertheless, X2 is more than just a worthy successor to X-Men; it’s a better film in almost every way, one that sets a new benchmark for every comic-book adaptation (ahem, Hulk) that will follow it. ‘Nuff said.
(4/4)