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88One 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.
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88Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.
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88A follow-up with as much artistic integrity, complexity, humor and well-designed action as the original.
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75A summer firecracker. It's also a tribute to outcasts -- teens, gays, minorities, even Dixie Chicks. It's not without thought or feeling, except when its mind gets bent by the gods of box office. Then it's craven and empty.
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75Perhaps in the next generation a mutant will appear named Scribbler, who can write a better screenplay for them.
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75This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.
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75A sleek, rousing contraption, a comic-book movie with a sense of playfulness, a welcome streak of humor and just the right touch of gravity.
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75As irresistible as movie-theater popcorn - a lavish, reasonably intelligent, well-acted sequel with kick-butt effects that outdoes its predecessor, 2000's "X-Men," in almost every department.
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75As it is, most of X2's action is restricted to the Northeast Corridor, with a climactic face-off in the western Rockies, where, in typical blockbuster fashion, everything goes kablooey and ka-bam.
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75Visually, X2 is a sight to behold, with impressive special effects and a dynamic sense of place.
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63The longer the movie goes, the more its 133 minutes prove wearing. The story tries to develop a love angle between Jackman and Janssen, but it doesn't begin to take. And the finale is particularly weak.
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25The movie is overplotted, a soulless maze of special effects and relentless action.
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70The combat visuals that follow are as powerful as those of any war film.
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30What the movie needs more than anything is a script. The story is very disappointing and near the end, things start to get weirder and weirder.
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89An altogether more viscerally engaging film, from its relentless pacing and slam-bang effects work to the fine, appropriately heroic score by John Ottman. That the movie has an obvious gay subtext neither adds nor detracts from the film’s smashing popcorn appeal.
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83X2 sparkles with a lightness of spirit that was missing from ''X-Men.''
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83It also boosts the punch of the movie that so many of its action scenes evoke the Iraqi War news footage of the past month, and the "X-Men" premise -- people persecuted because their difference makes them seem threatening -- carries even more relevancy and weight than it did three years ago.
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90A diverting mix of insight and spectacle, human and superhuman. This machine is built for kids, but rarely do words like "noble," "Hollywood" and "rawkin'" all apply to one movie.
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90The fantastic and at times deliciously nihilistic world of X2 is fully, believably three-dimensional.
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80Directed with depth, efficiency, and wit by Bryan Singer, the film suffered only from a tendency to seem like a setup for an even bigger movie...Fortunately, bigger usually equals better here, and when it doesn't, it equals just as good.
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80Funny, reasonably crazy, and unpretentiously faithful to its source.
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80Brisk and involving with a streamlined forward propulsion, it's the kind of superhero movie we want if we have to have superhero movies at all.
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80My chief complaint is that these mutants are a little--well, vanilla. I wish the X-Men had a touch of kinkiness to go with their weird abilities.
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80About twice as good as the original...bigger and more ambitious in every respect, from its action and visceral qualities to its themes.
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70In some ways, X2 is an obvious improvement on its predecessor: It looks more expensive, and its special effects seem to swoop out of nowhere...But "X-Men" was undoubtedly the most elegiac comic-book adaptation of the past few years.
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70Mr. Singer and his collaborators grasp that comic books, for all their obligatory fights and explosions, are at bottom about their brave, troubled, impossibly muscled characters.
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70Wants to contain multitudes -- high ideals and high tech, the poignant and the silly. Doing so, it becomes a lexicon of modern filmmaking. It could be its own creature: Super-Generico. That's not the worst thing for a movie to be, but it's not quite Marvel-ous either.
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70As in the first movie, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are trotted out periodically to add a little gravitas.
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60The best new addition to the corp is Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler.
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50Singer's approach to X2 is very much of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school, resulting in a movie that, even at its best -- a thrilling jailbreak scene that's the closest thing in either X movie to a rousing set piece -- seems tame and unmemorable.
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30Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.
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63A substantial improvement over "X-Men," in many ways, especially in visual and specialeffects departments.
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63It's scenic, confidently directed and performed, dutiful, faithful, revelatory, informative, and largely involving. Rarely, however, is it any fun.
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63There's a continuing delicacy to [Singer's] direction that gives the audience room to breathe and reason to linger. This may not be a grownup movie but -- unlike the Star Wars franchise or the Batman sequels -- it is a movie that grownups can watch minus the requisite bottle of Excedrin.
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67An engaging spectacle of energy and special effects built around a doomy mood and an ensemble cast vigorously pursuing a story line that isn't nearly as snazzy as the dressing.
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60There are simply too many characters to get a handle on, and the sheer proliferation of special effects offers Singer a license so unfettered that most of the mutants act not according to their natures but purely on the ground of what, at that juncture, looks most groovy. [12 May 2003, p. 82]
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40All the same, X2 and recent action adventures like it constitute a mutation in their own right: fast-paced, slow-witted movies in which the impact is the message; impersonal movies that deny any need for characterization; disjointed movies that make no apologies -- and pay no penalties -- for making no sense. Their special gift is giving little and getting a lot.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 74 out of 85
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Mixed: 8 out of 85
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Negative: 3 out of 85
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MatthewL.10Excellent, better than the first film...