X2: X-Men United Review

The opening seven minutes are the best thing anyone had done with a comic book character to that point: Nightcrawler teleporting through the White House in bursts of blue smoke, scored to a choral setting of the Dies Irae, shot by Newton Thomas Sigel with an actual sense of geography. Bryan Singer holds that discipline for most of the length.

Alan Cumming plays Nightcrawler as a gentle frightened believer rather than a monster. Brian Cox gives Stryker the flat bureaucratic calm of a man convinced he is doing public health work. The scene where Bobby Drake comes out as a mutant to his parents, and his mother asks whether he has tried not being one, is the sharpest writing the series ever found.

The cost of all this is crowding. Cyclops is written out in the first act and never recovers, Storm has nothing to play for two hours, and the Lady Deathstrike duel is a dull exchange of metal noises in a corridor. Jean Grey's death is carried by Famke Janssen's face rather than by anything the script laid down for it, and the picture stops twice to explain a plastic prison. The Alkali Lake climax is murky in exactly the way the White House sequence is not.