X-Men 2 (2003)

By the time X-Men 2 (aka X2, aka X-Men 2: X-Men United, but sadly not aka X2: Electric Boogaloo) rolled around, I had not yet become as disillusioned with the first one as I am now. Sure it was starting to form, but barely, so opening night I was there with my gal and my friends waiting to be blown away again.

In it’s first viewing the movie suffers the same way the first movie did, where the ending just doesn’t make any sense, but I’ll work my way to that. The movie opens up with Wolverine searching the area that Professor X had told him about at the end of the first movie, where he discovered information about an abandoned military base in Canada. But now there are just ruins so Wolverine heads right back home. The problem here is there is still a very active military base within walking distance of the old one, they’re even connected by underground tunnels, yet somehow Wolverine with all his military training and heightened senses, is completely unable to pick up on this.

Fortunately between that and the end of the movie things were pretty good, including Wolverine stabbing soldiers (resulting in guys sitting next to me in the theater acting shocked that Wolverine, a trained solder, was killing people breaking into the mansion) and even a cool fight scene with Cyclops to show off that he is a trained fighter (note: I’ve always been a Cyclops fan so this made me gitty).

Midway downfalls would be the Storm Nightcrawler sappy crap, which was only beefed up because Halle Berry was complaining about wanting a bigger part, and a moment where Rogue tries to stop Pyro by absorbing his powers which takes WAY too long and barely took the guy off his feet. The second one wasn’t that big a deal, but really the sappy crap with Norm (see what I did there?) was just annoying.

So we wrap up the movie with the X-men trying to make their get away, their jet engines not starting up while it’s parked in a valley beneath a cracking damn. Jean Grey, who’s been showing signs of the Phoenix throughout the movie, hobbles out of the jet on an injured leg to save her friends. She simultaneously holds the water back with a force field, starts lifting the jet out of the way, blocks Nightcrawler from teleporting to save her, and projects her thoughts through Xavier to communicate her goodbye to Cyclops. So for dramatic purposes they seemed to ignore a couple more logical endings. For starters there seemed no reason that Jean had to get off the jet to do this. Secondly, and way more importantly, Iceman was on the jet. A kid who less than an hour ago made a two foot thick wall of ice out of air molecules in a second’s time, and now there’s solid water rushing at them. I’ve said this many times; Iceman could have frozen the whole thing solid and the X-Men could’ve celebrated by playing a game of hockey (they were in Canada after all).

As far as sequels go, it was a good follow up with everyone and everything feeling and looking like an expansion of the first movie. Unfortunately that’s where the problems stemmed from.

Marvel Movie Score = 6.5

Why That?: While the action scenes stepped it up, and it did have a good story, the ending was just so horribly botched that I can’t get over it. It has really made me start to question Bryan Singer and his writing team’s (as he works very closely with him) actual talent as they seem to just forgo logic for the sake of telling their story. This becomes way more apparent in Superman Returns, which can not be reviewed as a Marvel movie.