X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)

X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)

Tagline: First, they were fighting for acceptance. Now, they're battling for survival.

(Action, Sci-Fi, Blue) [PG-13]

Logan, my tolerance for your smoking in the mansion notwithstanding, continue smoking that in here, and you'll spend the rest of your days under the belief that you're a six-year-old girl.

In this one, we pick up just a few months after the last installment. Now Magneto and his band of human haters are brought into the fold to take on Wolverine’s old nemesis William Stryker who had enough tech to totally just break into Professor X’s school and kidnap him. Only now they have to deal with a bunch of new anti-mutant legislation on top of everything else. We also get a great introduction to some mutants we didn’t see in the first movie. Iceman and Nightcrawler to name a couple. 

I think for a lot of X-MEN fans the first movie was fantastic and let the world know what could be done in superhero movies, but X-MEN UNITED basically lit the torch on getting the band back together to take on bigger problems. It’s a very straightforward movie that doesn’t use an overcomplicated storyline to trick you into thinking you might be watching something amazing. It knows what it is and goes straight for the adamantium. Unfortunately, I don’t think it aged well overall for most people, and part of that “this wasn’t that great” sentiment comes from X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and what people thought of that, not this movie as a stand-alone. 

Performance-wise Anna Paquin does a great job ad Rogue and seems more settled into the role. James Marsden is perfect as Cyclops, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are back and both great. I also liked Shawn Ashmore as Ice Man (now he plays another superhero type as the Lamplighter on the TV show “The Boys”). The only casting choice I wasn’t’ crazy about is Aaron Stanford as Pyro, but to be honest, that probably means he rocked it. I couldn’t stand that dude, which might have been the point. Needless to say, Hugh Jackman also crushed it as Wolverine, but I can’t imagine an X-MEN movie or any movie where he would be the actor you point to and say “see, they should have not hired him”. I am a little torn on Nightcrawler. Alan Cumming did a fantastic job in the role, but only got 1 shot at it (apparently because it took too long to do his makeup, etc. and they were sick of it). I would have liked to have seen him reprise it in something other than a video game, but I also really like Kodi Smit-McPhee who taken on the role in more recent installments (I guess they got new makeup, guys?). I should also note that Halle Barry stood out more in this one as a more well-rounded version of Storm than in the first film. 

Cinematically I loved this thing, but regarding pacing, it takes a while for this movie to really get going and after the X-MEN get united with the former movie's villains it feels a bit over-crowded regarding the dialog. After reading about some of what they were planning on doing, I am glad they kept it down to just the charters we got, or they could have just split this into two stories. I guess there were about 27 different versions of the script. Story-wise this movie is just much stronger than the first one and still to this day stands out among the better X-MEN flicks. 

I gave X-MEN a 4 out of 7. This one I am going to bump up to a 5 out of 7. It was a bit too slow in places and when you are doing movies, I think you can worry about backstories, etc. over a set of movies rather than bogging things down in one film. Others would probably call that a strong point in this one.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.  

A look around the series...

X-MEN
X-MEN: THE LAST STAND
THE WOLVERINE
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE
X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX

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