X marks the spot

Yes, it’s my long-delayed (because we didn’t go out to see it until last night, and many thanks to Doyce & Jackie for helping enable that) X2 review.

Okay, no big surprises here. First off, it’s no Citizen Kane. Second off, it’s a damn fine piece of entertainment, and arguably one of the best “comic book” flicks ever.

While Spider-Man (the other contender for that title) builds a whole, unified story from scratch, X2 takes advantage of being a sequel to simply dive into the action. If you didn’t catch the original, you won’t be completely lost; the various characters and situations that carry over from the previous flick are explained by in passing, through action, rather than through lengthy narrative. Who the X-folks are, what they can do, what their relationships are, what the world is like, who this Magneto fellow is, all get touched on quickly and painlessly.

That lets us gets right into the action. The plot (and various subplots) border on being too busy without falling over into it. Any number of subplots could have been focused on further, more dramatically, but we only touch on each lightly, like a hummingbird, before flitting off into further action. That could be considered a weakness (and certainly means that X2 isn’t a Citizen Kane), but the overall feel is so satisfactory that it becomes merely a quibble.

This is a sequel that builds on the original as few such films do. Pretty much everything has been improved, from pacing to sfx. And there’s plenty of foreshadowing for X3, which it sounds like pretty much everyone is eager to do, contractual obligations permitting.

MASSIVE SPOILERS BELOW:

I’m going to do this by character, just because that will touch on most of the movie points.

Cyclops: Would someone just shoot this guy? I mean, the comic book Scott Summers is a bit angsty (and has some reason to be — orphaned, saddled with a power that can kill someone at a glance if he loses control); the movie Scott Summers (James Marsden) alternates between being a stiff and being whiny lip-quivering sob sister. Yeesh.

That being said, we do get to see him in some action, though not as much as I’d like. It’s good to see he can fight as well as zap. But he snivels way too much.

Wolverine: Hugh Jackman continues to be one of the hearts of the story and the action. He often seems a lot more calm than I expect, interspersed by some serious berserking. He is also a much more insecure and bewildered Wolverine than in the comics, and that vulnerability is strangely compelling. Some good fight scenes, some good reminders of his healing and adamantium body, and some good playing with his mysterious, hidden past (now not quite so hidden).

This film is less of a Wolverine movie than the original, but there’s still some of that. While Wolvie is a fan fave, and Jackman plays the role well, I’d still like to see more attention paid to other characters.

Jean: Famke Janssen is showing why Jean is always the calm center of the X-crew, even as we start building up for X3: The Rise and Fall of the Phoenix (or whatever we call it). The whole birth of the Phoenix thing has been interestingly morphed from the original tale — not quite successfully (I, at least, still don’t understand why she had to leave the plane) but decently enough. My only question was going to be how they ended it — with her actual rising from the waters, or just a hand, or … well, something more subtle. I’m not sure I preferred the more subtle (especially coupled with Prof becoming aware of it — and why the hell wouldn’t he excuse himself from class and go tell Scott and Logan?), but it worked well enough.

In the meantime, we get to see how powerful Jean’s becoming (evolutionary leap? Hrm). Nice stuff, even if it does make Cyke even less effectual of a character. And Janssen does it nicely, having as heroic a mien about her as Jackman.

Storm: Halle Berry is the biggest waste of space in this movie. As annoying as I find Cyclops, Berry’s Storm is dead, dull, and boring. Even when she’s talking about her “anger,” it comes across as a badly acted high school performance (by, admittedly, a nice piece of eye candy). She’s also amazingly undymamic in her poses. For some reasons, whenever she’s doing her weather invocation (which always takes a huge amount of time, and involves very obvious Wagnerian rises in the music), she simply stand there and waits for the fx crew to color in her eyes.

And, well, yeah, from a writing standpoint the tornado thang with the jets was kind of cool (though not nearly effective enough — though, in digression, it was neat to see a female fighter pilot, who, I’ll add, emoted a lot better with a helmet and muffled radio voice than Berry), but willy-nilly blasting structural crossbeams apart in a church seems not only overkill, but stupid. Though, perhaps, that was just her “anger” showing through.

Berry’s a liability in this film, to be honest. And her “fame” requiring that she get such a prominent billing (and appearance in the movie poster) makes that even more of an insult. Doyce mentioned that Berry has not yet resigned for X3. Fine. Replace her. We need the character (as a visually interesting one), but we can lose the actress.

Nightcrawler: Fantastic. A great example of taking a character and doing some nice extensions to him. The fx surrounding his teleporting were excellent — the whole White House invasion routine is going to cause a zillion arguments between players and GMs in various campaigns for years to come — and his role as both religious and an outcast freak were both well-written and well-acted (by Alan Cumming). They did a nice job with his physiognomy, too, within the bounds of using a human actor. Subtle, but nice.

Rogue: This was far less of a Rogue movie than the first one, though she still plays a large role. Fact is, though, as currently written, Rogue’s power is kind of useless. That means she has to rely on dramatic acting, rather than action, and Anna Paquin does a decent job of it. If there’s a “Young Mutants” movie one of these years, they’ll have to do something with her similar to what happened to the comic book Rogue.

Bobby Drake: Oooh, more teen angst and family alienation. Shawn Ashmore does a decent enough job alongside Paquin (though the Wolverine rivalry never pans out), but, his powers, too, are underutilized. I’d like to see either more, or less, of him.

Pyro: You just know he’s gonna be trouble, but the scene with him and Magneto in the Blackbird is nicely done (as is his rather dramatic dealing with the cops — though given how hairtrigger they were with Wolvie, I can’t believe that nobody took a shot at him while he was blowing flame in each direction). Aaron Stanford does an okay, if unmemorable, job of being the alienated teen. Good hook for next flick, though.

Professor X: This remains the role that Patrick Stewart was born for (as appalled as he’d probably be by such an assessment), and certainly his numerous instances of mental domination on ST:TNG held him in good stead here. He plays the combination of strength and vulnerability excellently, and he’s about the only person who could possibly say (though he didn’t this time around) “To me, my X-Men” and not sound like a dork.

Magneto: Jeez, Ian McKellen is good. And he does a very nice job of being both a sympathetic victim and an absolute evil bastard. They did some great stuff with Magneto’s powers this time out (the iron balls bit is fabulous, as is the grenade stunt), and he remains a must-have villain for the next flick.

But Pyro is right — it is a dorky helmet.

Mystique: She gets a lot more screen time this outing than last, and the writers to a nice job of it. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos plays her role very well, a combination of will and ruthlessness, and, again, a bit of — well, not vulnerability or neediness, but that scene with Wolverine (and Nightcrawler before him) is great.

Why, though, if she can frickin morph clothing would she have scars left? Or was that an intentional hint on her part? (Presumably she can morph scent as well, else Wolvie would have clued in faster.)

I’m glad we got to see (her as) Sen. Kelly (Bruce Davison) again; that was another of those points where it was nice to have seen the first movie, but not essential.

She makes a great partner/lackey/aide for Magneto.

Lady Deathshrike: Well, they never call her that, but the Yuriko Oyama character (played with mechanical efficiency by Kelly Hu) is, in fact, a very retconned version of that character, and provides a good foil for Wolverine to duke it out with. I do like the knuckle-cracking schtick.

Does it bother anyone that she was actually a mind-controlled lackey of Striker’s who still ends up getting killed by Logan?

Striker: The movie is based (they say) on the X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. Striker has been morphed from the televangelist of that book to a military scientist, which makes him much more conventional (see below) as well as letting him be tied neatly into the Wolverine origin. Brian Cox is appropriately viscious in the role, and comes to a fitting (if oddly off-screen) end.

Jason: One of the joys of a movie like this for ubergeeken such as myself is piecing together the bits of source material that went into them. So when dialog started about Striker’s son, Jason, I was scratching my head trying to figure out who was being referred to. Jason Striker? Parallels to Wolverine? We talking Sabretooth here?

Nah. Jason, as in Jason Wyngarde, as in Mastermind, master illusionist, one of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (and, coincidentally, someone who plays a big role in the whole Dark Phoenix saga. Sure, he’s described here as Jason Striker, and he shows up in the credits as Jason 143, but we all know where that Jason name came from.

The use of Jason here is a very fine twist on the original — the master manipulator being manipulated, the dark side to Xavier’s lightness (both tied to wheelchairs no less), the multiple parallels drawn between him and Wolverine, and so forth. It’s never quite clear to what extent he’s brain-damaged (he certainly seems lucid enough in his illusionary ego) or simply under Striker’s control. I do like the mismatched eyes, by the by, both in and of themselves to denote instability, and as a visual cue in the illusions.

Only question is — what happens to him? Nightcrawler bamfs in and out, taking Storm and the Prof to safety, we see Jason sitting on the Cerebro 2 gangplank, and then … we’re running down the corridor. I can’t believe that Kurt would leave Jason behind (nor that the Prof would let him). Did the (failed) rescue simply not film well? Was there a last second decision to snip out the huge block of concrete that kills him? Presumably he’s dead, but … stay tuned for the DVD release …

The Cast of Zillions: The creators here (as last time) had tons of fun with hints of the the X-universe. There are the other kids at the school — Kitty Pryde (great wall-running/phasing scene), Siryn (the screamer), Colossus (the steel-skinned guy). There are folks caught in passing, such as Dr Henry McCoy speaking out in defense of mutants on TV. And there’s a brief mention of dozens of others on the computer screen that Mystique is at — Xian Coy Minh and Pietro come to mind (and, damn, wouldn’t the latter make for a nice plot hook next time out).

The President: I have to say that the Pres (Cotter Smith) was both pretty believable and one of the first Presidents I’ve ever seen on TV who didn’t come across as a Bold, Strong, August Edward G. Marshall sort of personality. Interesting.

The school: The movies, far more than the comics (until very recently) have really played up the educational nature of the Xavier School for Gifted Children. That lets us see lots of cameo mutants, but it also works very well. Problem is — isn’t their cover blown now?

God Loves, Man Kills: This was the graphic novel (one of Marvel’s first, and from the days with “graphic novel” meant something written explicitly in a longer, deluxe format, not a compilation trade paperback) that was the inspiration for the movie — though, aside from a few names (Striker) and plot points (using Xavier to kill mutants), there’s very little similarity. The graphic novel featured a televangelist, haunted by a personal secret, running his own vigilante organization to kill mutants (the book starts off with two mutant teens being hunted down and killed, their bodies left on a playground as a public warning).

What’s lost in the transition is more explicit focus on prejudice, and on the human ability to overcome it. Because, in the end, GLMK is a story about human choices, human fears, human villainy and betrayal, human heroism in the face of public condemnation — in which the X-folk play a central but secondary role. It’s a great book, but this movie isn’t it. Marvel’s reissuing it, and it deserves to be picked up if you haven’t read it.

To wrap it all up, I had a lot of fun with X2. I expect to pick up a copy, though it’s not so strong of a film (better than the first though) that I expect to frequently rewatch it. But rewatch it I will.

And let me just say, as my vote for (aside from Magneto) the villains of choice for X3: we want Sentinels!

Today’s fun X2 trivia: Alan Cumming (Nighcrawler) and Famke Jannsen (Jean) previously appeared together in the Bond flick Goldeneye (as nasty programmer Boris and assassin Xenia Onatopp)