Movie Reviews

There's a lot of stuff I really liked in this new X-Men movie, and I think it's better in every respect than the first one. Unfortunately it seemed as though the "whole" came across as a little less than the "sum of its parts".

I'll start with the good stuff. The new character Nightcrawler (played by Alan Cumming) opens the film in an amazing and original special effects sequence. Another incredible effects sequence occurs as Magneto (Ian McKellen -- excellent as always) breaks out of his plastic prison. We also get to see more of Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), which is a plus in a number of respects (including the fact that she turns out to be quite an interesting character). A group of teenage mutants (no, not turtles) provide a solid side-story. And finally, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) gets a lot of screen time, stealing the show in nearly all his scenes.

The problem with X2: X-Men United is that there's almost too much interesting stuff happening, and a lot of it gets brushed aside or only touched upon briefly in favour of a mundane, hackneyed plot about some guy seeking revenge against all the world's mutants because Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) wasn't able to "help" the guy's mutant son a number of years back. For example one of the side-stories involves Wolverine's origin. Fascinating stuff, for sure, but I felt a little cheated when the film would move away from stuff like that and back towards the slightly-lame revenge/mind-control plot. With such brief glimpses of so many interesting characters and situations, I wanted to know more about them, and I didn't care too much about whether the "good mutants" and the "bad mutants" would team up to fight a common enemy and find the second Cerebro and save Professor Xavier, etc. etc.

I listened to Roger Ebert review the film on his television show the other day, and I really liked a suggestion he made: Why not just grab two or three of the mutants and have them "branch off" into their own, smaller-scale story, the sort of thing that is sometimes done in comic books? I think, for example, that Wolverine could've easily starred in his own film, perhaps investigating his origins and searching for other people like him or something.

Anyway, all this probably makes the film sound worse than it is. It's certainly not a bad film by any means -- in fact, it's quite good. But you know what they say about too much of a good thing...

(editor's note: apologies for the cheesy way in which this review ended)