X2: X-Men United
Directed by Bryan Singer
Starring Hugh Jackman, Hale Berry, Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, Famke Jansen, Rebecca Romijin-Stamos, James Marsden and Brian Cox
Going into “X2: X-Men United,” director Bryan Singer name-dropped both “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan” and “Star Wars IV: The Empire Strikes Back.” His attitude was that his sequel to 2000’s “X-Men” would be the celluloid equivalent of those two (beyond worthy) sequels. That ballsy claim turned out to be legitimate.
While not as towering as “Empire” or “Khan,” “X2,” like those films, creates a level of potential that could not be matched by later installments.
Acting with precision, Brian Cox plays William Stryker. Stryker is a military man with an axe to grind with Professor Charles Xavier (played by an equally precise Patrick Stewart) and his school of persecuted mutants. For personal reasons, Stryker has been waiting for the right moment to impose his sectarian views on an already panicky United States. When mutants are to blame for an attempted presidential assassination, Stryker cons his way into an invasion of the school (a 9/11 parable before 9/11 parables were cool). This sends the X-Men scrambling (kinda like “Empire”) and forming a tense allegiance with Ian McKellan’s wonderfully villainous Magneto.
Admittedly, “X2” has more characters than it can handle, but Bryan Singer has, at least, 1 writer for any 4 actors. The end result is a movie that feels like a tag match for the cast. Yet, Singer knows he has an entire library of over-developed Marvel characters at his disposal. He takes the best elements of the long-running comic series, everyone gets a fair cinematic shake (okay, maybe not James Marsden), creating an entertaining sci-fi argument.
The key to “X-Men” is the race angle and how the characters deal with that. Say what you want about angst, but discrimination is the crux of the comic, everything else should be a by-product of that. Somehow, between the mercy killing of Halle Berry’s vanishing accent and the increasingly playful display of superpowers, Singer has managed to embrace what the “X-Men” are truly about. He chooses the right characters to say the right things at the appropriately wrong times. They point out the hypocrisy of humanity while in their amusing pleather outfits. It tells you more about them and the not so fictional world they live in.
It’s a hell of a balancing act, but it pays off in a way that the first film did not.
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