TheRetroCritic

Back in the day, I was crazy-excited about every X-Men movie release. A fan of the comics, I enjoyed the first film and was certainly looking forward to seeing more of my favourite characters in a sequel. Of course, all this positive anticipation for the franchise ended after (or actually, during) X-Men 3 but that's another story. I had forgotten how much better than the first film this second instalment was. It's ridiculously better. Not amazing or anything but certainly a vast improvement. For one thing, the scale was much more suited to an X-Men film. Also, you had a much better villain with a much better masterplan in Brian Cox's William Stryker with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) given more interesting things to do this time around besides just being one-dimensional douchebags. It's a bit less of a cliched doomsday machine plot in that although Cerebro is a big part of Stryker's plan, it's not really all we get plot-wise from