So Sunday turned out to be a really Marvel Day for your humble host. (Don;t snicker, I am too humble. I’m WAY more humble than you are.) Anyway I started my day getting up and 8:00 am and no I am not a church-goin kind of fellow, unless you count movies as church, which they might in my case. Anyway I, and my sweetie-wife, rose early so we could catch a 9:15 showing of Captain America: The First Avenger, the last piece needed before next year’s The Avengers. (my quick opinion on Captain America? It rocked. This is a very hard character to write and I imagine a harder one to play but the writers nailed it, and Chris Evans did a fine job. Frankly I consider this film an apology from director Joe Johnston for The Wolfman.)
Anyway for my Sunday Night Movie I selected X2: X-men United. I really enjoyed the first two X-Men movies, Bryan Singer has turned out fine film after fine film during his career. Quite a few of his pieces are in my DVD/Blu-ray library, including X2.
X2 starts where X-Men left off. The villain Magneto (Ian McKellan) is locked away in a plastic prison while his surviving and loyal follower Mystique (Rebecca Romijin) works to find someway to free him. A mutant assassination attempt on the President send events spiraling out of control with the villainous William Stryker (Brain Cox, a fine actor in many films I own) uses the emergency for his own murderous and genocidal plans. This was a worthy sequel and in many ways superior to the first film. Though to be fair the first film had the heavy burden of establishing the world for those who are not familiar with the comic book setting of The Uncanny X-Men. Freed of that Burden, Singer start this film off with a bang, the assassination attempt on the president, and never touches the break again.
That is not to say this is a Michael Bay film with nothing but explosions and chases, but rather when Singer stops the chase he gives us compelling drama that keep us watching just as mush as the action did. This is one mf my early DVDs and still a valued purchase.
The only off note and this is really a creative difference, in the film to me is about Stryker. he hates mutants, all mutants and he truly believes that the only good mutant is a dead mutant. (Though he is not above enslaving them for his purpose.) Stryker is a technical and scientific genius one of the very few men in the world that can manipulate the indestructible metal Admantium. Truly his genius is staggering. At one point in the film is launches an attack that threatens to kill all mutants, and the first symptom is massive head pain. Because it does not effect non-mutants, normals feel nothing and Stryker feels nothing. Man I would have had Stryker laid low by his own deviced. I would have his particular genius be a mutation and I would have had the character realized that he was what he hated all along. But that is my style of plot construct and not Mr. Singers.
All that aside this i a fun, well crafted film, that even after a busy day kept me engrossed well past eleven pm.
