Really??????

Rating: 2/10 (25 November 2003)

I saw this film in the summer and was really underwhelmed. I quite liked the first film, for style and tone if not the afterthought plot, so I was expecting good things from this film as the introductions had been done in the first film and we could crack on with a really good story.
Maybe I need to see this film again but I don't see where on earth all these great reviews came from. I could see how people might think it was okay, or diverting and entertaining but no more. I left the cinema pretty cold. More characters were introduced, more background needed filling in and Bryan Singer seemed to not know how to handle it. Maybe it was the story/script at fault, maybe the editing went astray but I thought this was a lesson in how not to handle an ensemble film that an X-Men film is always going to be. He lost control of all the stories, especially near the end, it seemed like we were jumping between plotlines in a quite unplanned way.

As in the first film I didn't rate the main storyline much either. I hope that when X-Men 3 (or X3, or XXX or whatever it's going to be called) comes that the less is more approach is taken and we get a more structured narrative round the interesting characters, new characters are limited, and we get a good central storyline that is is more than a subplot for the ongoing humans versus mutants story. I think this franchise has potential from what we've seen but has been let down so far by weak story and weak characters.