One of the things that makes this movie such a great rush is that while you're watching it, it seems a good deal more subversive than it really is. As Ian McKellen's Magneto points out late into the film, in one of the only bits of dialogue that could conceivably be called subtle, he and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) aren't really so far apart in their aims — where they differ is in their methods. Xavier's methods favor peaceful coexistence, Magneto's favor dispensing with the opponent completely. Both men represent the mutant community, the subject of much suspicion and outright hatred from . . . that's right, the human community. Hence, X2 features many scenes in which the mutants must battle the authority representatives of humankind, that is, the police and the Army.
And indeed, as maladjusted young mutant Pyro (Tadpole's Aaron Stanford) tosses fireballs at a thick blue line, one couldn't blame a random viewer for humming along with an old N.W.A. jam playing in the back of his or her head. It's an exhilarating spectacle, seeing these smug, loudmouthed enemies of civil liberties getting a little of their own. But it's all an illusion. Once the battle's over, director Bryan Singer is very careful to let us know that the worst any of the cops has suffered in this standoff is a singed eyebrow.
Singer's a remarkably canny filmmaker, and the picture he and his team deliver here grabs the first X-Men's crown — it's by far the best movie adaptation of a comic book, ever. To complain that it's an unsubtle allegory is to miss the point — Singer, like the Marvel comics writers and artists he's adapting, is a smart and splashy entertainer rather than a master of nuance. If you can accept that the terms it succeeds on are, aside from being entirely their own, entirely valid as well, you can recognize this as one of the outstanding pictures of the year.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.