The second half of an epic comic book movie...

Rating: 10/10 (1 August 2014)

THIS is why it's so important for producers to pick the right director. In the hands of a less competent filmmaker, this one could've been laughable. (Not that a filmmaker suited to ONE franchise will be suited to all- SUPERMAN RETURNS being a prime example, in this case.) "Sharing the world has never been humanity's defining attribute," Professor X tells us in the opening voice-over. We're soon introduced to the sleazebag William Stryker (Brian Cox), who manipulates the weak-willed Nightcrawler into a one-man assault on The White House. This sets in motion a "reprisal" raid, in which Stryker is able to capture a sampling of teenage mutants to experiment on (his son, it turns out, is a mutant and Stryker has been experimenting on him): he wants to turn the world's mutants into "normals." Magneto, meanwhile, plans to reverse the effects of Stryker's machine (Cerebro II, patterned after Professor X's Cerbro, which allows him to telepathically contact every mutant on the planet at the same time). My one gripe about X-MEN II is the almost incidental part played by Cyclops- my favorite mutant from the early days of the comics (patterned after The Comet, no doubt, an early comic book hero who could fire bursts of energy from his eyes; the only real difference between the two being that The Comet could fly). None of the subsequent films in the series equaled the first two.