worth the price of admission, BUT...

Rating: 7/10 (9 May 2003)

How was X2? Ehh...fairly decent. definitely worth the price of admission, but the movie is not without serious flaws.
X2 was thankfully not as boring or lethargic as X-Men, but it still needed a shot of adrenaline. Even though there was a boatload of characters, i felt that not enough stuff actually happened in the movie. I felt there needed to be at least two more one-on-one fight scenes and also a good group-vs-group maylay. Nightcrawler's intro and the Wolverine/Deathstrike fight were great, but I felt they were bigger teaser to upcoming bigger events that just never happened. The X-Men were repesented as a minority sect fleeing their persecutors. I think that perspective makes for great story-telling, but i think for an action movie, Singer spent too much time having the X-Men on the defensive. I've read reviews about Marden's portrayal of Cyclops. Yes, the role was reduced, but I think his brief presense and emotional breakdown of losing Jean were very well done.
Lastly, I wasn't crazy about the ending. X-men versus lots of water. That was about as satisfying as the alternate ending of Blade 1 featured on the DVD. In the alternate ending of Blade 1, he's up against this 5 story blood tornado. But the makers reshot the ending because the scenario of protagonist versus liquid just doesn't produce a big enough pay-off to movie-goers. People go to see a big-budget action movie to see the ultimate conflict resolved in a big action sequence. Sorry, guys, spewing water just doesn't cut it. The resolution has to be with the antagonist that faced the protagonist with overwhelming odds throughout the movie, not with a soulness, faceless force of nature that appears in the last reel.
There are a lot of other little things that needed tightening up, but enough people have written about them, so I don't feel i need to. Granted, while there was a lot of room for improvement and the movie was too long to sit through (w/o jetting the the bathroom), i still walked away happy that I saw it. I think non-comic books fans would be uber-bored, but I must confess, I will definitely pay to see X3 when it rolls around in a year or two. Hopefully, the movie makers will have learned from the mistakes in X-Men & X2