X2: X-Men United
The X-Men are back and better than ever. Okay, there's only been one other film, but this one is much better than the original. (Nothing beats the comic books.) A freak assassination attempt on the President by Nightcrawler convinces him to authorize an operation by military scientist William Stryker to infiltrate Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. It just so happens on the night of the operation, Jean Grey and Storm have been sent away to capture Nightcrawler and Professor X and Cyclops go to Magneto to see if he is behind the assassination attempt. All the pieces fall into place for Stryker as his true desire was to capture the pieces to Cerebro and kidnap Professor X and manipulate him to kill all the mutants in the world. Once Magneto escapes from his plastic prison, he works with the X-Men to save Professor X and stop Striker at all costs.

This film uses a similar formula as the first. The first half shocks and awes us with the true power these mutants have, showing off to us mortals while the second half delves us into the story. The first movie falls flat in the latter aspect simply because nothing interesting ever happened that piqued my imagination. The sequel performs marginally better, providing a reversal of situations in the middle of the climax while giving everyone a major role in the ending, not an easy thing to do with so many "main" characters. (Except for Iceman...what was his deal? He doesn't do anything. He lets Rogue fly the jet. They're threatened by WATER of all things!) The movie though seriously drags on during the undergound lab scenes. You could tell by the audience, who in my case, reacted to literally every scene only to stay silent throughout the lab scenes. All together, this is a really long movie for what it shows on screen. Long movies are okay in some situations (I hope the Matrix sequels are 3-5 hours each, for example) but simple friends vs. foe adventures like this one don't need to top out at any more than 2 hours. And one of my pet peeves is when a movie sets things up for a sequel unless it's meant to happen like in a middle of a trilogy. This one does it shamelessly in many scenes. But these are minor quibbles to an otherwise solid movie which is much better than the original. 3 stars