X2 misses the opportunity to pit Ian McKellen as Magneto against Patrick Stewart's Xavier. Here Magneto uses his mutant powers to overcome a guard (Ty Olsson).

So, without giving away the ending — and believe me, the end has a lot of great stuff, some of which blows up real nice — I’ll just say that the X-team members battle separately but, dramatically speaking, less effectively than one wishes they would. While the way that the crises and complications in the climax keep escalating is impressive, they ultimately seem to have less dramatic effect than their potential promises. Each crisis feels of equal weight to the one before, as in each, a specific team member gets to take center stage. Again, this is a tried and true building block in action team stories. But in this one, you never get the sense the whole team is racing down court to win the game.

Don’t get me wrong. X2 is great fun, and reasonably true to the characters. (Topics such as whether — or how much and when — Wolverine kills his foes has been a topic of geek discourse since the 1970s, after all. The X-films stir that sort of debate up all over again.) You certainly do feel like you’re in the X-Men’s world from beginning to end. You get the feeling that you’ve been told a good story, yet one that’s just part of a larger tapestry, one that makes you want to be sure to see the next one.

The star of the X-Men team, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), delivers the goods in this film.

I just never got the feeling the X-Men were united. And that’s too bad — because, y’know, they’re a team of outcasts, fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them. People that selfless deserve to have a better choreographed ending then these folks get.

So go see the movie. You might want to read Chris Claremont and Brent Anderson’s God Loves, Man Kills X-Men graphic novel before and/or after you see it. A lot of the film’s story was inspired by that. The X-Men franchise was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with significant parts of the mythos added to by Len Wein, Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Neal Adams and Roy Thomas, among others.

Talk about great teams…

Danny Fingeroth, veteran Marvel Comics writer and editor, led the company's Spider-Man line, as group editor, during its highest-selling years. Way back when he was assistant editor on the X-Men, including God Loves, Man Kills. Danny has also created, developed and written comics and animation for AOL-Time Warner, ShowTime Online, Visionary Media, Brilliant Digital Entertainment and Byron Press Multimedia. Currently, he is the creator and editor of Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now! magazine, published by TwoMorrows, a highly acclaimed publication about writing comics, animation and science fiction. Danny’s Behind the Scenes at an Animated Series, from Scholastic, is now on sale. He is also at work on Superman on the Couch: What Super Heroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society, to be published in 2004 by Continuum. The Animated Century, a documentary feature film about the history of animation, which Danny co-wrote, will appear on Bravo later this year. And there’s still time to sign up for his May 14th Learning Annex NY comics writing class, as well as his NYU comics writing course, coming in the fall.