Better Than The First X-MEN...

Rating: Null/10 (8 June 2003)

...which isn't saying much, I know.
Let's get the pros out of the way first:
--Alan Cummings. Welcome to the cast, Nightcrawler. You kicked hindquarters. And I'm so glad your religious devotion wasn't written out of your character. Fan-freaking-tastic.
--Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. Mystique gets a MUCH bigger role in this movie, and it's well-deserved; Romijn-Stamos is outstanding. Forget the would-be romantic chemistry attempts between Jean and Logan or Bobby and Rogue; the real honest-to-deity romantic angle that works is Mystique and Magneto, which is due in no small part to some great chemistry between Romijn-Stamos and...
--Ian McKellan, who just flat out rules as Magneto. He's vulnerable, he's powerful, he's fatherly, he's overlord-esque. He's altogether brilliant. We are not worthy.
--Hugh Jackman. I love Wolverine. And boy, does Jackman ever own this character. Perfect mix of brooding and heroism.
--Aaron Stanford makes a great first impression as Pyro. He is truly bad-boy material and does an outstanding job with a small character.

But the cons on this movie are pretty big, too:
--The story both drags and rushes. You want to see more of the other mutants in the school, particularly during the fight against Stryker's armed forces, and they get short-changed. But a plotline involving Xavier being forced by mind control to use his awesome psyche to kill every mutant on the planet through Cerebro just drags and drags--will Xavier ever finally concentrate hard enough? Wake me when he does.
--Some of the acting is REALLY bad. Halle Barry is merely collecting a paycheck. Anna Paquin, who is normally very good (and even in the first movie wasn't sleepwalking this badly), is dreadful. Kelly Hu looks great but conveys zero in the way of personality or attractiveness.
--The movie is claustrophobic; practically every scene is set in some small room or underground chamber. You long for big set pieces ala SPIDER-MAN in Times Square after a while.

On balance, it's good and certainly worth seeing, but falls short of the gold standard of SPIDER-MAN by a large margin. 7/10