Magneto: my hero.

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2007)

This near-feminist weak sequel to the rather average first installment left me in tears... of boredom and laughter. The two don't normally go hand-in-hand, but the impossible CAN happen. The impossible (or shall I say absurd) as in Stewart having such enormous powers that he can kill all mankind with thought alone. Wow. How bombastic can you get. But the really silly bit is that this all-powerful Stewart - realistically speaking powerful enough to be mistaken for God - is so easily manipulated to do things against his will, such as kill all humans. So the merry band of X-Women had to prevent ALL of mankind getting annihilated. Even James Bond's missions don't get this silly.
It seems that nearly everyone's powers have quadrupled, at the very least, since the first movie. (I was even half-expecting the U.S. President to turn someone to stone or spew fire out of his ears.) Especially the female cast, which dominates here. But I guess in the laughable "girl power" (or "fashion-model power") age that we live in, what with all the Kill Bills, Death-Proofs, Ripleys, and other Lara Crofts, I should have by now gotten used to the fact that anorexic 6-foot super-models save entire galaxies in adventure films. (Just how do you get the energy to kill so many evil guys while boycotting food, i.e. starving?? I don't get it...) It is just sooooo convincing to watch an Uma Thurman chop-sokey 70 Japanese martial arts experts in one evening. It makes Bugs Bunny cartoons look like "Les Miserables".
I'm all for wild fantasy, but there are limits as to how dumb an action movie can get before it becomes a parody of itself.
Given the tremendous powers that Xavier and his goodie-two-shoes "mutants" have, how can the U.S. military, or for that matter, ALL of the world's military powers combined, do them any harm? Comic-book kiddy rubbish or not - that cannot be an all-purpose excuse here - even fantasy has to adhere to some form of logic and common-sense, especially the kind of fantasy that tries to make "relevant" political and social comments, thinly disguised in "mutant" (uni)form.
Apart from the ridiculous premise, we also have some Latin soap-opera romance going, in the form of a love-triangle (Wolverine, Cyclops & Jean Grey), and even puppy-love (Rogue and Iceman; I feel so silly even writing these names down...). Hence it's no wonder that the movie overstretches its welcome by at least 40 minutes, what with its whopping 130 minutes running time. There is very little going on in the first half-hour, which was particularly dull. The love-triangle implodes when Famke Janssen dies at the end. Was this supposed to be a touching/emotional moment? I yawned. Just check out Jackman's/Wolverine's unconvincing sobbing; but, hey, it's tough to act when you're in front of a damn blue screen all the time. And I guess in the third part we'll have Wolverine falling in love with Cyclops, right? Maybe as a little nod of approval to the gay community... And the less said about all those mutant kids being in the movie, the better... Dull props, nothing more.
One of the dumbest things in this lame sequel is Alan Cummings. He would have been bad enough in any human role here, but as a mutant? And a German mutant?? A German, Christian-fanatic mutant??? Cummings' accent reminded me of Sascha Cohen's gay Austrian Bruno character from his Ali G show. Almost as bad is Mystique (what a dumb dumb dumb name), who is given the ol' switcheroo shtick, so very much milked dry in about half of all "Star Trek" episodes. So she can transform into anyone? With that power she doesn't need either "God" or Magneto (another dumb name) to rule the world - all by herself! This kind of nonsense may look good to nerdy zit-faced pre-teens when offered in comic-book form, but on the screen it's just all far too silly. As most Marvel film adaptations are. Still, it isn't nearly as bad as Ang Lee's "Hulk"...
I am really looking forward to seeing the sequel! In it, I expect to see our X-Women powerful enough to make the Sun circle the Earth, maybe Neptune and Jupiter will be smashed together as one, and maybe Famke Janssen will re-surface as a sort of quasi-goddess, who gets jealous of Wolverine and Cyclops for getting a gay marriage license. She will then join Magneto and destroy the whole universe. All of these powers are merely a result of "human evolution", of course I am really, really looking forward to the third part. I have a copy of it, I just need to place it in the DVD. But some magic power is preventing me from it... Could it be...? Could it be Magneto? Maybe he doesn't want me to trash his precious mutants in yet another, third, review...