Solid comic book adaption

Rating: Null/10 (3 May 2003)

The first X- Men being mostly character driven and plot- based instead of being filled with action sequences, it'd be natural for the second one to have more action then storyline. Fortunately, most of the film adds up to what is an enjoyable experince, and a worthy box office opening film. The cast is all solid here, Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman leading the cast, with Famke Jansen, Alan Cumming, Halle Berry, and Ann Paquin in support. They all do their jobs, Hugh Jackman stands out the most as the tough Logan a.k.a Wolverine who's past is mysterious. Halle Berry still has a minor part in this film surprisingly, since she won an Academy Award it would seem like they'd give a lot more screen time and dialogue. The script by David Hayter is solid, but it could use a bit more polish. Some of the characters need to be intertwined more and sometimes the plot jumps around too much to uneeded relationships (e.g. Iceman and Rouge). There was also more dialogue needed for Nightcrawler who mostly just prayed in German and teleported around. Brian Cox portrays the villianous William Styrker who shares a connection with Logan, but the villian ends up being cliche in the end. Unfortunately, it would seem this film would be focused more on Logan's mysterious past but instead it takes the shortcut route and skimmes over the information. Brian Synger offers his talented direction here, which gives this film enough push to make it a good film. Instead of taken the approach he used in X- Men, in X2 he focuses more on getting the viewer excited about the next scene or following the characters closely. He fails a bit in the second aspect simply because they aren't developed enough. The visual effects are what stands out most in the film, creating excellent images that never look too fake. The scene that comes to mind is the introduction at the White House. The ending of this movie is actually surprising, and people who don't know the storyline of the comics or who haven't watched the origianl Television show will have trouble understanding it. X2 stands out as one of the better comic book adaptions to come onto the big screen, it's on- par with the first one, and definitely is better then last year's blockbuster "Spider- Man" or this year's earlier release "Daredevil." 8/10