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Right off the bat, I want to give Bryan Singer the true recognition he deserves. Last time,
I gave him so much crap for muddling up the action of the last one. But this time, it
is very evident that he got schooled. From the opening Nightcrawler battle to Stryker's
raid on Xavier's Mansion, the difference is visible. The wire-fu needs a little work but
for the most part, this film has action that is kinetic, intense and incredibly enjoyable
to watch. That said, the debates that made the first
film so compelling are seemingly gone. The problem lies with our villains, in that now
they are pure villains. Magneto wanted to enforce mutant superiority in the last movie,
an act that was at least justifiable, considering the hate and prejudice he had not only gone
through as a mutant but also as a Jewish person in WW2. Now he just wants to straight-up ***
all humans. Then we have Stryker. In the last movie, Senator Kelly wanted to have regulations
in place to protect humans from mutants, once again a justifiable notion. Stryker just wants
to straight-up kill all of the mutants. It's not that it's bad, it's just not as compelling.
We still get scenes here and there about mutant hardships, such as Bobby coming out of the
mutant closet to his parents and Nightcrawler talking about how humans feared him outside
of the circus. But those moments now take a back-row seat to the more comic-book elements
which now strut their stuff on the screen. The comic-book stuff is done extremely well
though. Gone are the insignificant Sabertooth and Toad so Mystique can be even more awesome
and we can get Lady Deathstrike, who may be an obvious Wolverine-expy with a dumb name,
but the actress that portrays her is so good that I don't even care. Even our main villan,
Colonel William Stryker, is played with such a presence thanks to Brian *** that I see
him just as menacing and as imposing as Magneto was in the last movie. We also get the pretty
cool new addition to the X-Men, the Incredible Nightcrawler, played by the spectacular Alan
Cummings in some decent blue makeup. The script, overall, is also very tight. The
way each little subplot intertwines is fairly seamless and the correlation between Wolverine's
Origin Story and the main plot of Stryker, along with Iceman and Rogue's little subplot
and Nightcrawler is very nicely done. That said, I am going with this movie until
the ending because quite frankly it's stupid. In order to escape the dam, they have to take
off in the jet, but the jet is too damaged, so they cannot take off. Jean decides to stay
outside to fend off the incoming torrent. You could make a drinking game out of the
billion ways that Jean could have been saved. She even turns on all of the functions inside
of the jet, making it fly-able. Why couldn't she do that from inside the jet? It's a dumb
way to end what has been a fantastic movie up until that point.
X2, despite its horrible ending, is on par with the first one. It's like some kind of
temporal singularity where one film focuses on narrative context more than visceral thrills
and the other...well, does the opposite. Whichever one is better depends mainly on what you found
more compelling, the action or the context behind it. I personally find the two equal.
This is honestly a really good start to what looks to be a promising series.