May 5, 2003 -- "X2," the sequel to the successful "X-Men" movie, is full of dazzling special effects, stunts and fight scenes, but the story is not as strong as the story in the first film. In fact, there isn't much of a story at all. It amounts to an incremental advance in the plot laid down in the first film.

Once again, the enigmatic characters of Magneto and Wolverine are the most interesting people in the film. Unfortunately, the screen time has been greatly diminished for Magneto and somewhat diminished for Wolverine, because of the introduction of many new characters. Returning are Patrick Stewart, playing the part of Professor Charles Xavier, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Halle Berry as Storm, Famke Janssen as Dr. Jean Grey, James Marsden as Cyclops and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as Mystique, Bruce Davison as Senator Robert Kelly and Anna Paquin as Rogue, among other returning characters from the first film.

New characters include Gen. William Stryker (played by Brian Cox of "The 25th Hour"), Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming of "Spy Kids"), Lady Deathstrike (played by Kelly Hu of "The Scorpion King"), Pyro (Aaron Stanford), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and a host of others. The most interesting of the new characters is Nightcrawler, a mutant who can, among other things, teleport himself and others here and there. The film doesn't develop its characters very well, perhaps because there are so many of them and so many action scenes that there is no time for character development.

The story picks up where the last movie left off, with Magneto still inside his plastic prison and the public anti-mutant sentiment growing. An attack by a mutant against the president in the White House galvanizes the government into action against the mutants. Stryker, head of an X-files type of secret government agency on mutants, is ordered to capture some of the mutants at Xavier's school. Stryker has other ideas. He hatches a diabolical plan to use the powers of the mutants against themselves in order to destroy them all at once. The race is on to stop Stryker before he can carry out his plan.

The story doesn't have as much meat on its bones as the story in the first film did. The first film had an interesting moral theme about racial and ethnic hatreds. That is what makes Magneto such an interesting character as a Holocaust survivor. He can clearly see the coming war between mutants and ordinary humans and he's doing his best to make that vision a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, such a war would probably be inevitable, if current theories are correct about the reason for the demise of earlier sub-human species on earth (that they were all killed by humans). The outlandish powers of the mutants in the film seem to have no basis in science. For one thing, these powers require huge amounts of energy and there is no way this energy could be housed in a human body, short of installing a nuclear reactor. Real mutants would likely be simply smarter or more creative than ordinary humans, but the conflicts between the mutants and ordinary humans would be no less real. The sequel has this same theme about intolerance, but it is not developed as fully as it was in the first film. There does seem to be a progression taking place toward more conflict between mutants and ordinary humans, however. This escalation of the conflict seems to be part of a trend that will, no doubt, be continued in the next sequel. There will be another sequel because this film will make more money than the first one did. This film rates a C+.

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Copyright © 2003 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.