<em>X2: X-Men United</em>?

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Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, James Marsden, Shawn Ashmore, Famke Janssen, Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman re-team for X2. All photos ™ & © 2003 Twentieth Century Fox. Unless noted otherwise, photo credit: Kerry Hayes/SMPSP. [1]

X2: X-Men United is a fun ride. If only it was more…what’s the word I’m looking for…? Oh, yes. United! The movie has so many terrific elements, I just wish they’d been able to put the parts together better at the story’s end.

Some Great Stuff
X2, of course, is the sequel to the hugely popular X-Men [2], and both chronicle the philosophical and physical battles between Marvel Comics’ two extreme camps of superhuman mutants, with plain ol’ mankind caught — less and less passively — in between. While X2 isn’t as novel as X-Men, as moving as Spider-Man [3] (or as flawed as Daredevil [4]), it has more than its fair share of cool stuff. For example:

• A knock-your-socks off, how’d-they-do-that opening introducing Nightcrawler;
   
• A great raid-on-the-X-Mansion scene, where Wolverine shows just how unique his powers are — and just how savage he can be;

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X2 introduces Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler in a spectacular way. [5]

• An even better suburban siege where the heroes actually have to face off against “a world that hates and fears them” — and where Pyro, Rogue, and, of course, Wolverine, show how dangerous it can be to be a mutant — and a mutant hater;
   
• A Magneto escape scene which, alone, is worth the price of admission (Sorry if I ruined it for you. He escapes. Get over it.);
   
• The nifty cameos by characters only diehard X-Fans would know, as well as script references for the same aficionados;
   
• The “do-or-die” climax wherein a major character undergoes a… significant change. It was dramatic and exciting and pretty much defined the “can’t/must” choices that superheroes always have to make. (“I can’t do that — but I must do that! What do I do?”)

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Pyro (Aaron Stanford) shows off his fire power. Photo credit: CINESITE. [6]

But…
So why didn’t the sum add up to as much as — or, even better, more than —its parts?

Well, for starters, there’s the team’s leader, Professor X — actually played even better this time around by the man who really was born to play the role, Patrick Stewart. But, despite being “the world’s most powerful telepath,” Xavier is played as a passive, ineffectual figure. One can understand that, as founder of and — literally — the mind behind the X-Men, he would be a vulnerable target and the one the bad guys would focus on. That he would spend so much of the movie as a victim, and not even be allowed to contribute much to his own rescue or the events that follow, is a letdown.

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Xavier (Patrick Stewart), seated in the wheelchair and seen here with Storm (Halle Berry), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Cyclops (James Marsden), is portrayed as too much of a victim in this sequel. [7]

Then, equally well-cast and well-played, Ian McKellen’s Magneto is also relegated to a sort of auto-pilot villainous role, betraying little of the complex motivation he was allowed in the first X-film. McKellen, too, is given precious little screen time, and little chance to have much real interplay with Stewart.

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine is, again, the real star of the movie. Jackman — and writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, as well as director Bryan Singer — indeed brings a lot to a role that could be just another killing machine type. But I wonder how the slowly unreeling mystery behind his origins will sustain itself over the course of several movies. It’s not like a weekly TV series where the pieces add up to something by the end of a few months, and you have the full story within a reasonable time frame.

Endings Are Always Toughest
The biggest problem with the movie, for me, and it seems to happen with a lot of action films, is when the filmmakers try to bring all the elements together for a rousing ending. There’s something about a team of anything — football players, dancers, horses — that makes you want to see them act together at the climax of a story. Sure, one or two of them will stand out, and maybe many of them will be reduced to looking on and acting impressed. But, much as you may love Derek Jeter, it’s the New York Yankees — the team! — you want to see win, even if Derek gets to be the hero of the game. And you want to see him win as part of the group. In basketball or football, this need is even more clearly expressed and satisfied. The quarterback throws the ball and the receiver catches it and makes the touchdown. But the rest of the team is out there making sure no one gets in their way. They don’t just watch and grit their teeth.

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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). [8]

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.

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The star of the X-Men team, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), delivers the goods in this film. [9]

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 [10] 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 [11] 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.