Good Sequel but Missed Opportunities

Rating: 9/10 (8 June 2011)

X2 X-Men United- 2003 Opening with one of the best introduction to X-Men universe of any movie, this movie starts out with a bang. The Nightcrawler invasion itself could be a short movie on its own, accompanied by Mozart's Requiem and the best interpretation of the character in all of his glory. The movie starts out by locating this mutant to isolate the human's retribution towards the attack, but it turns out to be a greater scheme regarding Wolverine's past and Magneto's true mirror in terms of intentions. This allows the movie to have 2 villains with different motives and not necessarily aligned with one another, making the film more interesting. Magneto and Xavier are not as prominent as the previous film, but just as powerful such as the scene where Xavier can notice that something is wrong with his friend just by looking at him. Nightcrawler has a romantic angle with Storm that is somewhat believable; Mystique has more action-spy scenes but missed opportunities with the relationships they could have played with Mystique and Nightcrawler. Lady Deathstrike serves as a good action scene where she fights Wolverine, but again she has zero character development, since she is under Jason's mind control and you truly feel sorry for her when she gets the Adamantium overdose. Pyro is a great character but severely underused and instead we have to endure the dull Rogue and Iceman who are even more boring and useless than the previous movie, especially Rogue since she no longer has that relationship with Wolverine that she had in the previous film. In the film's greatest defense; however, the overall story with Jason, Striker's mutant son who is an illusionist, to use Xavier to kill all of the mutants is downright genius, especially when Magneto uses it to his own advantage. Wolverine's berserker mode is also a treat in the movie during the mansion invasion. Looking back at these movies, X-Men and this sequel along with First Class, X2 has the bigger and more interesting scheme and more interesting villains but it also has too many missed opportunities regarding Mystique, Lady Deathstrike, Pyro, and Cyclops who are completely shafted in the film. In the case of Mystique, I refer to the opportunities the filmmakers could have included with Nightcrawler. The film also has one of the dumbest lines along with the toad electrocuted line from the first one and that is "Have you tried not being a mutant?" This is the equivalent of asking a dog "Have you tried not being a dog?" is the same logic and it comes off as silly in what is supposed to be a dramatic scene. Overall, the movie is better than its predecessor besides its missed opportunities since the villains are so enthralling and the plot is more dangerous and bigger in scope.