X-Men 2
Cert. PG12
Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin
Runtime: 134 minutes
I have to confess, I’m the kind of sad person who gets excited at movie trailers -there’s always something in me that hopes the actual film might live up to it.Still, I was hugely disappointed by the first X-Men movie, despite the amount of money it made, so I wasn’t really holding my breath for this one even though the trailer made me jump around my house in excitement.
Oh, how wrong I was. All of the things that were wrong about the first movie were put right – more action scenes, a more cohesive storyline, and characters that I actually cared about.
The film starts where we left off last time. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is off searching for clues about his past. Magneto (Ian McKellen) is still in his plastic prison. At Professor Xavier’s school, life has returned vaguely to normal.
Until, that is, a new mutant, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) teleports into the White House in an attempt to kill the President. This sets off a chain of events leading to a new enemy, Colonel William Stryker, who launches an attack on the school.
Luckily, Wolverine has returned to save the day and most of the students escape – but Xavier’s mind-reading mutant-detecting machine, Cerebro, is still there for Stryker to use as part of his evil plan, leaving the X-Men little option but to team up with old enemies Magneto and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) to try and save the world.
Most of the mutants from the last film are back, with a few new ones to make life more interesting: Wolverine meets his female equivalent in the shape of Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Nu), and some of the younger characters from the first film are allowed to play with the big boys – Anna Paquin is back as Rogue, although slightly less annoying this time round and she has Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford) in tow.
As with the first film, the special effects are excellent – Magneto’s escape from prison was a definite high point, although I don’t know whether I’m just biased because I love Ian McKellen so much. There was also an improvement in that the people with the better skills won the fight, as one of the main issues with the first film was that the evil mutants had much better powers and should have won.
Having not read the comic books or watched the cartoon, I was really impressed with X2 and completely surprised by the twists in the storyline. But comic geeks beware: I’ve been told that a couple of the main points in the story are completely different to the books and may cause offence, especially regarding the sudden increase in Jean Grey’s (Famke Janssen) powers.
Again, as with X-Men, X2 blatantly sets itself up for a sequel. The difference this time is that people will leave the cinema actually wanting to watch it.
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