Great scenes + great characters = decent movie?

Rating: 8/10 (14 May 2003)

I was quite enthusiastic about seeing X2, and for the most part I left quite satisfied with the results. I'm not quite ready to say that this film exceeds the first movie.
What we have here is a set of undeniably cool characters and fantastic scenes, but they are sewn together in predictable and almost cliche patterns. Adding to the hurt is the fact that I watch movie trailers closely, and any big surprises this movie intended to deliver were drastically softened by the scenes shown there. That may be unfair, but big blockbuster movies like this that plan on inundating people with marketing material should be more careful with what they reveal. When you see 10-15 commercials plus 2-3 trailers for a movie, you are going to pick up on a lot of things unless you take better care to hide them. Shame on the production team for that.
Character portrayals are quite good individually, but interactions are a little off. Magneto and Mystique pull off the best chemistry in the movie amongst the characters from the first movie. The scenes with Stryker where he interacts with Wolverine, Magneto, or Professor X are surprisingly good, pulling off a sense of real history that characters from the first movie got for free. Other areas suffer. Iceman's dealings with his family fell flat for me. That should have been a pivotal scene, but it played out like a clip from 90210. Luckily that scene doesn't last long.
The bad chemistry moments aren't really that bad, and they're quite hard to notice with all the action going on. You rarely get a chance to breath before someone flexes their mutant powers for some reason. Unfortunately, these displays of power often feel disjointed, like a bad fight scene. Punch, block, punch, block. It feels like the script was divided up into one section for each mutant to show off his or her powers. This gives the film overall an awkward flow. The sheer coolness of most of these scenes tends to outweigh this awkwardness. I'm going to rate this film an 8 out of 10 because I really did enjoy myself while watching it. However I think that if I wait another week to review this film, it will drop to a 7. The reason is because any thought after-the-fact on this film only further exposes its weaknesses, and that really isn't fair to a film that delivers some devastatingly good popcorn fun.
My advice would be to see this film without high expectations, and don't let the occasional brilliant scene get your hopes up for a smart film. Set your brain on autopilot and bask in the great action. In the end, the plot really doesn't fly, but pretty much everything else does, and marvelously. The opening scene alone should go down in history as one of the best fight scenes ever.