Starring: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin
Director: Bryan Singer
Rated: M15+
HAVE you noticed how many comic book characters are in the cinema these days?
Spiderman, Daredevil and X-Men have led the recent charge, with The Incredible Hulk and another Superman movie on the way.
The better box office performers in this group are getting the sequel treatment as well. Enter X-Men 2.
Unlike many other sequels in the science fiction, action thriller genre X-Men 2 does not pick up where we left off in 2000. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) runs Xavier School in Boston (the only thing missing in this place is a Jesuit!), where he helps mutant humans to hone their skills and use their evolved abilities to better the world.
General Stryker (Brian Cox), whose son is a mutant, is out to destroy them all. He tortures Magneto (Ian McKellen) into revealing Xavier’s secrets and uses the information to manipulate the more vulnerable mutants into trying to assassinate the President. This action unleashes a search and destroy mission.
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean (Famke Janssen) are left to save the day.
X-Men was a surprise hit in 2000, making a profit of $136 million. This time around the budget has been almost doubled to $158 million, and almost all of it can be seen in the spectacular special effects. The production crew is largely back with a couple of new writers and John Ottman, a very busy editor who is also the music composer. I think he should stay with cutting the pictures.
The main players stage a return, but since 2000 Berry has claimed an Oscar, Jackman has become a star, McKellen has been traipsing around Middle Earth, and Patrick Stewart has been trekking endlessly through the stars.
The scientific question behind the story is interesting enough to contemplate. When and how will human beings evolve next? But such an inquiry is background noise to the fiction side of the science, and the action side of the thriller. X-Men 2 is a dark, long-play, sideshow ride.
The problem with X-Men 2 is the story. It has five major sub plots which take 45 minutes to set up and then clamour for attention through a good deal of cross-editing. Once the action really kicks in it’s exciting enough, but we are a bit weary of it all by then.
The film drips in religious iconography including Wagner, a purple devil who lives in an abandoned church. He is the one forced into making an attempt on the life of the President. He repents, and spends much of the rest of the film saying the Rosary in German, so he can’t be all bad.
The cynics say that if producers want to win an Oscar they make films about a mentally or physically handicapped person, or the Jewish Holocaust.
