here's a wayward tourist on the White House tour. Or so it seems until the dark figure sheds his overcoat and reveals himself to be a blue-skinned, yellow-eyed mutant (Cumming). Leaping over Secret Service agents, disappearing and reappearing out of thin air with a disconcerting "bamf!", the mutant comes close to stabbing President McKenna (Cotter Smith) on his Oval Office desk before vanishing altogether, leaving only a knife with the message "Mutant Freedom Now!"
News of this near-assassination reaches the students of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, on a museum field trip with teacher Storm (Berry). Instructor Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) tells boyfriend Scott "Cyclops" Summers (James Marsden) that she is having trouble with her psychic powers. Meanwhile, students Rogue (Anna Paquin), Bobby "Iceman" Drake (Shawn Ashmore) and John "Pyro" Allerdyce (Aaron Stanford) get themselves into trouble until Professor X (Stewart) freezes everything and allows them to get away unnoticed.
Wolverine (Jackman), meanwhile, has made it to Alkali Lake in Alberta, Canada, where he discovers to his dismay that there is no trace of the lab he hoped to find. Back at the mansion, he's told to babysit the students while Storm and Jean Grey go in search of the blue mutant Nightcrawler.
Back at the White House, Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) hears the president authorize top-secret military operative William Stryker (Brian Cox) and his silent assistant, Yuriko Oyama (Kelly Hu), to detain and interrogate the inhabitants of the Xavier School, which Styker is convinced conceals a secret mutant stronghold. Stryker has his own ideas about the operation.
That's because Stryker has been in touch with the villainous Magneto (McKellen), who is still caged in his plastic prison. Stryker has some power over Magneto, forcing him to disclose secrets about the X-Men. And when Professor X and Cyclops go to consult Magneto about the assassination attempt, Stryker is ready for them.
Alone in the Xavier School with the children, Wolverine finds himself the only defense against Stryker's men. Meanwhile, Senator Kelly, revealed to be the shapeshifting Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), comes up with a scheme to free Magneto to take some action of his own.
Faster X-Men, thrill, thrill
Because of its 30-year history and complex mythology, Marvel Comics' X-Men series seemed ill suited to film adaptation. The only way to make a good X-Men movie, it seemed, was already to have made one. And so comes X2, the concisely titled sequel to Singer's 2000 smash hit, and the youthful director admits it's the movie he really wanted to make the first time around but couldn't.
No longer burdened with the task of introducing a raft of characters and setting up the mythology for an audience unfamiliar with the comics, Singer and his team of writers are here free to hit the ground leaping, with a bang-up prelude that introduces Cumming's Nightcrawler in all his glory. From there, X2 is longer, bigger, meatier and much more layered than the original film, making the excellent first movie seem almost streamlined by comparison.
Basing the sequel on the "God Loves, Man Kills" and "Weapon X" comic arcs, Singer et al. manage the admirable feat of bringing back the seven original X-Men and incorporating four major new mutants, as well as a new villain. Yet the stories interweave adeptly enough that we don't notice anyone getting short shrift. Each character has an important moment or two, and each major relationship is given its due (though in reality, a few characters have very little screen time, notably Stewart's Professor X and Marsden's Cyclops).
But X2 also delivers the thrills, including a massive assault on the Xavier School, a dogfight involving the X-Jet and a mano-a-mano smackdown between Wolverine and Hu's Lady Deathstrike, not to mention lots of fire and ice and a finale that may or may not set up a third movie. It's worth mentioning that, in this day of routine cinematic wonders, Singer comes up with a few things viewers are not likely to have seen before.
Though the tone of X2 is more comicky than the first film, it nevertheless holds fast to the humanity that imbued X-Men with such resonance. Much of that is due to the almost uniformly excellent acting, particularly on the part of Jackman, McKellen and Cumming, who is unrecognizable in appearance or voice to anyone who thinks of him as the quirky Fegan Floop from Spy Kids. (And for comic fans, they got Nightcrawler's "bamf!" right.)
