There’s some serious confusion over the title of this movie. The official name is X2, which is of course completely silly, unrecognizable, and sounds like a prequel to Vin Diesel’s XXX. Fortunately the nice people at UGC Cinemas Cardiff weren’t blinded by corporate hype, but listed the movie as X-Men 2, as it should be.

The movie gets off to a good start. In the first hour or so we’re introduced to new characters (Oh Nightcrawler, I’d almost forgotten you!), get plenty of superhero action, and some almost subtle moments (like Iceman cooling Wolvie’s drink). Two things of note: The new villain has the worst dialogue ever and Kitty Pryde is still only alluded to.

But then things start to drag. There’s too much exposition, especially when most of the surprising events aren’t that surprising if you’ve ever read X-Men or seen a movie. The script get lost with the characters with Wolverine getting the most screen time, while most of the others fade into background, only to deliver a dramatic line or two. Ian McKellen does silly postures, there’s the obligatory ”your uniforms look stupid” remark, and Logan lays waste to a whole lot of people. (Incidentally, when Pyro lets loose with his fireballs, no-one gets killed, only some soot on their face.) The last hour feels too long, and the coda is both unconvincing and stupid.

But I must say I still enjoyed the movie. The ”new” characters add spice, because people already familiar with the comics will immediately attach value to them. In fact, given the huge number of protagonists, it would be nearly impossible to flesh out everybody’s background, and in my opinion it is not even needed in a movie like this (something Spider-Man failed to do.) This also means that without former knowledge the characters will feel truly shallow, but you can’t win ’em all.

There is one juicy bit of tragedy concerning a central character which all Marvel fans will recognize the first moment it’s referred to, and it works. Well, not as well as in the comics, but still. There’s more soap here than in the first part, and that’s good. After all, Marvel comics have always been soapy, with their heroes falling in and out of love, dying and all that.

Rating: € € €

Footnote 1: The Matrix trailer was awesome, really breathtaking. I’d only seen the teaser before and I must say I can’t wait. The trailer for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen looked sort of promising as well, though I’m not familiar with the comic. We’ll see.

Footnote 2: The commercials shown before the main feature included one for deodorant brand X that vocalized everything that is usually left unsaid. It featured lots of sweaty men doing things that sweaty man apparently do (sports, sauna, dancing) and featured the lines ”Sweat only attracts other men” and ”Use deodorant X, attract women”. How much more explicitly hetero can you get?

Footnote 3: I really should cut down the number of parentheses, shouldn’t I?