Violent Femmes
At some fast-approaching point in pop-culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, at which time everybody will be an outsider and there will therefore no longer be an outside. In the fleeting meanwhile, we have scintillating reminders of the struggle — like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from Comic Book Land to increase the already peaking respectability of geek life. A paean to emotional liberation disguised as a high-tech action romp, this huge-budget endeavor offers a diverting mix of insight and spectacle, human and superhuman. It’s a machine built for kids, but rarely do words such as noble, Hollywood and rawkin’ all apply to one movie.
X-2 returns us to the world of “gifted” mutants established on film three years ago in X-Men and four decades ago in the charmingly antiquated comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Kicking things off, a blue-skinned teleporting demon crashes the White House, intent on stabbing the president. Despite their heroics in the first film (saving New York and the Statue of Liberty), mutants everywhere find their hard-won freedom in jeopardy again. As the patriarchal Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) puts it, “sharing the planet has never been humanity’s defining attribute.”
This time, because metal-warpin’ meanie Magneto (Ian McKellen) is securely stowed in his plastic prison (or is he?), we need a new heavy, ably supplied by the original cinematic Hannibal Lecter himself, Brian Cox. As the cunning and fascistic General Stryker, Cox seeks to rid the world of all those nonhuman weirdos who are having a hard enough time just coming out to their horrified middle-American families. This forces an uneasy alliance between Xavier’s mostly benevolent mutants and Magneto’s ranks of baddies, dwindled now to one — the shapely, azure shape-shifter Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), who guarantees an outbreak of MTBS (Multiple Teen-age Boner Syndrome) every time she sashays into battle.
Back when even-tempered Xavier and pouty Magneto were kids, they built this really huge round room called Cerebro, which Xavier can use to amplify his brainwaves and affect anyone, anywhere. Stryker, with his distasteful might-makes-right philosophy, decides to harness Cerebro to destroy all mutants. Helping put the damage on is his assistant, Yuriko Oyama, aka Death Strike (Kelly Hu), whose fingers extend into lengthy, Freddy Krueger-like blades, which prove pretty nifty in a third-act confrontation with the similarly clawed Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).
Oh, yeah — Wolverine. In a way, the continuing tale of this popular scientific experiment-cum-rockabilly caricature shows how skillfully returning director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) brings narrative coherence to a story with so many mutant characters vying for screen time. But somehow, Singer and screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Daniel P. Harris neatly interweave the threads. This time, their characters breathe a little more, with Wolverine in the middle, ripping up bad guys when he’s not suffering the somewhat trite nightmares of his dubious origin.
It’s a geek-realm cliché that darker equals better, but X-2 is indeed darker and better than its predecessor. It’s also moodier; we’re reminded almost nonstop that it’s a hard-knock life for mutants. As in The Ring, there’s a sad, creepy little girl involved in the suffering here, but it’s not much of a stretch to see all these characters as sad, creepy little girls.
The movie’s attractions are manifold. As Kurt Wagner (the “blue demon,” Nightcrawler), Alan Cumming defies the odds to become both German and Christian but for once not annoying. The editing and suitably heavyhanded score, both by John Ottman, are both top-notch. There’s even a pussycat for the girls and Cyclops’ Mazda RX-8 for the guys. But above all, as with that other X-named Fox franchise The X-Files, the main attraction seems to be this: Who wouldn’t want to hang around in Canada for months on end, pretending every day is Halloween?
