Cinemutants - X2: X-Men United (2003)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2003, it’s X2: X-Men United. After a mutant attempt on the president’s life, the X-Men are scattered when Col. William Stryker (Brian Cox) leads a raid on the Xavier mansion. Logan (Hugh Jackman) leads a group of kids to safety while Professor X (Patrick Stewart) seeks answers from his imprisoned friend Magneto (Ian McKellen). Meanwhile, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) tracks the mutant assassin (Alan Cumming), even as her powers begin to overwhelm her...

1. Empire state of mind. You can take a few different tacks with a sequel, but X2 wears its influence on its sleeve when it comes to The Empire Strikes Back. Like Empire, X2 lets the villains win in the first act, separates our heroes for their own journeys, and then reconvenes the cast for a life-and-death third act. It’s also like its sci-fi forerunner in that it’s arguably better than its predecessor, but while you could make a reasonable case for Star Wars over Empire, it’s hard to say X2 isn’t an improvement in nearly every way from the already-strong X-Men. As immediate sequels go, X2 is in fantastic company, setting the bar in a way that nearly every second MCU installment (Winter Soldier aside) misses.
2. We’re not as alone as you think. The X-Men comics have one of the deepest benches of characters, with so many distinctive faces and abilities across what was then forty years of storytelling. A standout feature of the comics has always been their delightfully soapy quality, with long-running storylines that feel at times more like daytime television. X2 continues the masterful juggling act from the first film and adds in the likes of Colossus, Nightcrawler, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and (after a fashion) Mastermind, with expanded roles for Iceman and Mystique. Surprisingly, the film never quite plays favorites; while some performances are stronger than others, there’s an incredibly balanced approach to the disparate plot threads. (Excepting, I think, Colossus, though his inclusion feels a bit like living scenery for the mansion. We’ll see him get his due in surprising fashion in a few weeks.)
3. The war has begun. While Ian McKellen is pretty safely the best villain the X-Franchise has ever had, Brian Cox is a very close second as William Stryker. In the seminal comic God Loves, Man Kills, Stryker was a televangelist with a rabid anti-mutant agenda; here, he’s the military scientist attempting to exterminate mutantkind, with the added backstory of being the architect of the project that turned Wolverine into Weapon X. Stryker will end up being a subplot that weaves through nearly all of the X-films (often unsuccessfully, as Wolverine’s mysterious origins tend to disappoint the more we tug on that thread). But when you want to anchor a franchise to Hugh Jackman’s performance, it’s helpful to have Brian Cox’s quiet menace lurking in the background, pulling the strings while McKellen gets to have all the snarling, snarky fun befitting a Shakespearean actor of his stature.
4. Have you tried not being a mutant? While everyone’s suddenly upset of late that the X-Men “went woke” (which incoming comics editor Tom Brevoort recently and smartly dismissed as a meaningless "infinitely adaptable scarlet letter" these days), those of us who have been paying attention know that the X-Men have always had a progressive bent, with mutants standing in as a sliding signifier for any tyrannized minority. Stan Lee occasionally claimed not to have intended the subtext, but it’s hard not to read the series without seeing any myriad of political controversies at play. At roughly the same time that Grant Morrison was exploring mutants as queer allegory, X2 is overt with its gay reading of mutants; Bobby Drake’s conversation with his parents reads inescapably like a “coming out” scene, replete with his mother’s tone-deaf “Have you tried not being a mutant?” At every turn, mutants are persecuted, hunted, and enslaved, and X2 is unflinching in allying itself with the oppressed.
5. Something bad is supposed to happen. If X2 is the franchise’s Empire moment, the good guys can’t win outright at the end; Magneto gets away, with an X-recruit in tow, and the whole thing concludes with an invocation of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” arguably the comics’ most iconic and expansive storyline. In it, Jean Grey succumbs to her repressed powers, becoming a cosmic force of unspeakable strength and annihilating an entire solar system. Nearly all of us knew that the first time Jean’s powers malfunction, X2 was promising that the Phoenix was going to rise. It’s tremendously confident to tease the Phoenix in the film’s final frames (a moment that might probably be a post-credits scene today), but we’ll see that the Phoenix often becomes the franchise’s Everest summit, tempting to approach but perilous to scale. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is X2 still one of the best superhero sequels ever made? Or has it aged poorly in the wake of its paler imitators? Join us next week for X-Men: The Last Stand (and it very nearly was).

Monday at the Movies - August 6, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Nine of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week I’ll be covering the original X-Men trilogy.  (The prequels will be getting their own post further down the line.)

X-Men (2000) – In many ways, we comic book movie fans owe a lot to Bryan Singer, who demonstrated in this film that the genre was a viable one beyond the self-parody of the Schumacher era.  Singer wisely opts to throw viewers into the midst of the mythology without a lengthy origin sequence; we join Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Rogue (Anna Paquin) as they meet the X-Men, a group of powerful mutants led by Professor X (Patrick Stewart) in opposition to the evil Magneto (Ian McKellen).  Using Wolverine and Rogue as entry points is genius; diehard fans already love Wolverine, and newcomers will find Jackman one of the more engaging comics-to-film translations.  But the film is populated by fantastic actors – including Halle Berry, who doesn’t do much but does it well – and none are more brilliant than Stewart and McKellen, who as dueling foes are more Shakespeare than Stan Lee (who cameos, by the way – his first in a Marvel movie).  Even James Marsden, who’s usual more milquetoast than Patrick Wilson, proves a good fit as the stick-in-the-mud Cyclops.  As director, Singer does a great job making the soap opera source material accessible and streamlined without sacrificing the emotional complexity of the characters; there are hundreds of X-Men, but Singer picks the big ones and never loses sight of the fact that their interactions are more interesting than the giant machine Magneto builds for the surreal climax of the film.  Above all, this is a film that feels real, that winks not ironically but lovingly at its source material, acknowledging its depth without overloading its audience.

X2:  X-Men United (2003) – Singer proves the rule here with a comic book sequel that is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (which, if you’ll recall, was no slouch).  Unfettered by the necessity to introduce the characters and their world, Singer dives headlong into the central problem of acceptance by pitting the X-Men against military bureaucrat William Stryker (Brian Cox), whose policy of indiscriminate mutant genocide unites heroes and villains.  Everything successful about the original stands here, as well, turned up to 11; the acting excels, from McKellen as caged animal Magneto to newcomer Cox, whose performance drips sadistic menace with each drawled consonant.  The cast of characters is beefed up a little, but never disproportionately beyond what the film can handle and never without significant narrative and thematic purpose; each addition deepens rather than overfills.  X2, perhaps more than its antecedent, operates on the level of metaphor, something I really want my superhero films to do.  Here the metaphor is on the nature of intolerance, which Singer carries off without being overbearing; in one standout scene, among my favorites in the trilogy, a mutant’s mother asks, “Have you tried not being a mutant?”  It’s an oddly quiet moment in a summer blockbuster, but it’s one that reminds us what’s at stake behind the flash of optic blasts and the snikt of razor claws.  Bonus points for its clever link with Stryker’s abuse of his own mutant son, which reminds us that bigotry isn’t a spectrum.  Even the previous film’s villain recognizes this, and McKellen’s nuanced return is a more than welcome one.

X-Men 3:  The Last Stand (2006) – When Singer stepped aside from his pet franchise to direct Superman Returns, Brett Ratner stepped in.  It’s a series of bad decisions that led to a pair of lackluster films (more on Superman Returns later), which is a shame because there are obvious moments where X-Men 3 is on the right track and other moments when it obviously goes awry.  The introduction of the “mutant cure” is in many ways a perfect end to a trilogy about what to do about heterogeneity, but Ratner seems to overcompensate for getting a shot at the X-Men toy box by cramming the film with scores of new characters who don’t do much at all.  (Ask yourself how many of their names you can remember.)  Worse, the film kills off some of the more interesting characters very early on, presumably to make room for the new faces, but for my money the film never really recovers from (spoiler warning) the death of Professor X.  The film trades in clichés, as when a military drill sergeant is played by R. Lee Ermey or when a character repeats, dead serious, the bromide about a woman scorned.  The climax is among the better action sequences in the trilogy, if only on a purely visceral level; Magneto’s manipulation of the Golden Gate Bridge is a brilliant visual, and the execution of the “fastball special” is as fun on film as it is on panel.  But the film fumbles so much before that point – and butchers the “Dark Phoenix” plotline almost beyond recognition – that X-Men 3 tries to be too much and ultimately never succeeds at being much at all.  The trilogy deserved better.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - May 14, 2012

After a brief hiatus, welcome to Week Nineteen of “Monday at the Movies.”  Between reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and attending a second screening of The Avengers (still highly recommended), we’ve only got one movie on the docket today.

RED (2010) – Can it be?  A comic book movie whose source material I’ve never read?  But the premise of the film – Hollywood’s finest senior citizens (a cast of all-stars, including Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Brian Cox) portraying “retired” intelligence agents – was too good to resist.  And on this, my second viewing, I realized that the plot is really ancillary.  What gets these agents out of retirement is a series of assassinations which eventually finds them in the crosshairs, but very few moviegoers are going to latch onto that in the way that they’ll latch onto the character types.  Ringo Starr thought he might win an Oscar if he acted naturally, but while you won’t see any Oscar-winning performances here you will see actors playing to their strengths:  in essence, the aged Avengers.  Willis is the strong, silent type; Freeman is the jovial elder with a voice of gold; Malkovich is the nutty and unstable one; and Mirren and Cox are the romancing agents from opposite ends of the Cold War.  The chemistry – and extreme sense of fun – flies off the screen and will leave you with a big smile on your face.  It’s not the deepest spy film you’ll see all year, but it’s probably the most fun. 

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!