X-2: X-MEN UNITED
So Sequel Summer begins non-alphabetically, with the reunion
of those Marvel-ous mutants who leapt from the pages of comic
books and into our hearts three years ago. After they spent the
last film saving the world, you’d think there’d be some
well-earned respect for the likes of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman),
Rogue (Anna Paquin), Storm (Halle Berry), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen),
Cyclops (James Marsden), and their bald, benevolent, wheelchair-bound
leader, Prof. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). But guess again—the
human population of Earth is still suspicious of our multi-talented
and makeup-caked heroes, and when a new guy named Nightcrawler
(Alan Cumming) enters the White House and tries to attack the
president, things get really hot for them. But Nightcrawler, a
purple-skinned, decoratively tattooed, devout Catholic German
mutant named Kurt Wagner (who is able to disappear in a cloud
of smoke and reappear somewhere else), is not operating under
his own will. He’s being controlled by a highly placed presidential
aide named Col. William Stryker (Brian Cox), who has it in for
the mutants and wants to turn the human population against them.
Before securing his government job, Stryker was a scientist,
a kind of Dr. Mengele for mutants who has experimented on them
and figures prominently in the dark history of Wolverine—whose
memory has been judiciously erased. In order to better control
them, he’s devised some sort of drug (administered at the
lower two-thirds of the nape of the neck) which renders them dumb,
docile, and highly suggestible. Sounds like the perfect date-rape
drug, but Stryker has even darker motives. He’s so determined
to rid the world of the genetically advanced race of non-humans,
he’s copied Prof. Xavier’s mutant-location mechanism,
called Cerebro, and plans to find and destroy them all. This development
panics Prof. X and his crew so much that they must form an uneasy
alliance with his old X- nemesis, Magneto (Ian McKellen,
not as pretty as Gandalf but arguably more powerful) and his purple
body-suited, sexy-shape-shifting minion, Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos).
This movie is fun like the first one, with our old friends
performing their amazing feats with pleasing regularity and some
new faces offering their talents too. The trouble is, the story
(by Michael Dougherty, Daniel P. Harris, David Hayter, and director
Singer, among others) is far too complicated for its own good,
and this results in an unacceptably long running time. After about
1½ hours, I thought, “This has been a great movie!”
When the 2:00 mark came and went, I was saying, “Is this
ever going to end?” The huge cast of characters may make
for a veritable cornucopia of interesting talents, powers, and
special effects, but there comes a point when all the plot twists,
love stories, and predicaments upon predicaments wear too thin
for such a non-substantial concept. Comic book characters are
not meant to support a storyline of such complexity; if X-2
were a comic book, it would be 2 inches thick.
There are certain diversions (sex, money, ice cream) where one can always rely on the maxim “more is better.” Movie film isn’t one of them. ****
