The Weird Turn Pro

X-Men 2
Directed by Bryan Singer
Story by Zak Penn, David Hayter, and Bryan Singer
Screenplay by Michael Dogherty, Dan Harris, and David Hayter

This movie falls into that strange category of sequels like Spiderman 2 or Batman Returns where everybody seems to be in agreement that it’s a great film far superior to the original.  Everybody, that is, except me, sorry.  After the promise of the first movie, this one hit me as a grave disappointment.  Let’s take the plot, for example.  The first film was mainly about Magneto—a Holocaust survivor who, having confronted and survived the greatest evil humanity has ever witnessed, finds himself with great power.  He belongs to a new race of super beings called mutants, which humanity fears.  As our government begins to exhibit what he sees to be fascist traits and practices, he comes to the conclusion that humanity cannot be redeemed, and so he starts to recruit a mutant army for what he sees as a coming war.  One of his old friends, Charles Xavier (also a powerful mutant), has a different perspective and his team of mutants protect humanity—pitting them against Magneto’s Brotherhood.  The plot of the first movie is so rich, that many of these events are simply hinted at, but they stir every event which transpires.  In X2 the plot is not much more than an origin story about Wolverine’s metal skeleton, so call me crazy for finding this movie to be a sad departure.

Some of the original story does make it into X2, though.  Magneto, when visited by Charles Xavier in his plastic prison cell, warns of the day people will come for his kind, and how they must be ready for that day, and he seems to be speaking from grim experience.  I may be wrong about this (and one treads very lightly when talking of these subjects), but I believe what is being invoked is an event in 1938 called Kristallnacht (or Night of Broken Glass).  On this horrible day in history, Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were ransacked and vandalized across Germany.  It was the first major event where physical violence was used against Jews instead of anti-Semitic policy, and it is widely referred to as the actual beginning of the Holocaust.  A similar day is coming for mutants, Magneto is sure of it.

He seems to be right, because, expediting tensions between mutants and humans, an attack on the president himself is orchestrated… but by whom?  This is the first and arguably the best scene in the film.  In an ultra-choreographed fight scene that would make John Woo jealous, a mutant named Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) storms the White House, defeats the secret service, and personally menaces the President with a knife marked, “Mutant Freedom Now!”  This leads to a quick scene where the government does come for the mutant kids, conveniently being watched by Wolverine—our favorite loner who always, always happens to be around—providing the set-up for lots of Wolvie-bearing-claws-and-snarling sequences.  Then, something funny happens.

Instead of staying within the Holocaust allegory, we radically diverge from the plot because the leading the agents is Stryker—also leader of a project called Weapon X.  Weapon X is, essentially, Wolverine, and it’s responsible for bonding super-strong metal (a fictional alloy called adamantium) to his skeleton.  This is one of the major events in the X-Men story cannon, and there are some people that actually compare this origin retcon to Frank Miller’s thunderous re-imagination of Batman in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns.  These people should have their head examined.  While I’m sure many people wish to see Wolverine’s origin story fleshed out in this manner, it is really not nearly as good as people say, and it takes mucho time away from the X-Men movie plot which, up until now, has been surprisingly good.  Weapon X has its place, yes, but its place is undeniably a solo Wolverine movie, for heaven’s sake.  The X-Men story arc, literally, gets put on hold while we go there, and we’re there for almost the entirety of the film.

I really don’t mean to be complaining endlessly about the Wolverine character.  I know he’s very popular.  But the movie focuses on him to such an unholy extreme that there isn’t room for much else, and the other heroes and villains become nothing more than background characters in the story of his life.  Let me cite three examples:

First we have Lady Deathstrike, one of Stryker’s mind-controlled henchmen.  There is no reason for her to be in the movie.  She appears without an iota of back story,  and has been provided with no personality, no dialogue, and has no bearing on the plot.  Nothing.  Her only reason to exist is to provide yet another climactic battle scene with Wolverine.

Second, we have the back story of Bobby Drake, otherwise known as Iceman (Shawn Ashmore).  It looks as if we are going to focus on him for a moment, as he goes home to reveal to his family that he is a mutant.  This is potentially an important scene for this character, but we still, somehow, end up on Wolverine the whole damn time.  This has to be seen to be believed.  The emotional scenes all fall flat because although we are in Iceman’s home, ostensibly, for a talk with his family, we simply don’t spend any time with them, and it is never clear what their motives are for doing anything.  We’re too busy watching Wolverine open beers, make wisecracks, and talk on the phone.

Third, we have the ever-present friction between Wolverine and Cyclops.  Let me remind our humble readers that the reason why Wolverine hates Cyclops so much is because he wants to bone Jean Grey—Cyclops’ friggin wife.  This is fine, I guess, except for the fact that we the audience are expected to hate Cyclops along with him.  Though seemingly devoted, poor Cyke has been left with no scenes demonstrating any chemistry with Jean, and he is not featured in any of these movies nearly enough to be competing for her affection.  This is nothing new in Hollywood, as women leaving their husbands for the main protagonist is often glamorized.  So we the audience are meant to encourage the flirting between Wolvie and Jean and the suggestion that she’d leave Cyclops if Wolvie could just be depended on to stick around.  This Wolverine won’t suggest he’ll do, even though as far as we can tell, he’s always around.

I would talk more about the plot, but there really isn’t any.  Supposedly climactic scenes seem lifted from other movies.  Magneto’s big escape from prison, complete with tranquil operatic music in the background, is filmed so much like Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s escape from prison in Silence of the Lambs that I kept expecting Magneto to say, “Ready when you are Sergeant Pembry.”  In another scene, Wolverine faces off with the police who tell Wolverine to drop his weapon (his claws), and he tells them that he can’t.  This scene made a lot more sense in Edward Scissorhands because, unlike Wolverine, Edward could not retract his blades to the inside of his arms.  Toward the end, our heroes flee from a rapidly deteriorating compound looking for their jet, which is upsettingly not there to pick them up.  This is an exciting and suitably climactic moment… in Aliens, when handled by good actors and a much better set up.  Finally, bad guy William Stryker’s strutting, head-bobbing speeches to Wolverine about how “they’re really the same”, are so jaw-droppingly clichéd and derivative that upon hearing them, I almost yawned myself to death.

The script regularly tries to remind you that a story still exists somewhere in this mess, but we digress so thoroughly that when Nightcrawler suddenly states that he pities people that persecute him because, “most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own eyes,” it just seems random and out of place.

Review by Master Jimmy