It hasn’t held up as well as you might think.

Oh, it’s still a good movie, and arguably the best X-Men movie, and it has a few undeniably classic scenes: the opening attack on the White House, Magneto’s prison escape, homoerotic soda cooling. It’s less dependent on quips than the first X-Men and less throttled by its own mythology than Days of Future Past. It even sets up what could have been an excellent sequel (unfortunately, Fox

has been incapable of doing anything decent with the Dark Phoenix Saga).

But X2 suffers in comparison to the movies that have followed and surpassed it, even suffering from some of the flaws of the MCU we normally think it escaped. Most of the sexuality is thwarted or off-screen; it’s not quite Everyone Is Beautiful, But No One is Horny, but it’s closer than I remembered. Like its immediate predecessor, it still seems embarrassed of its source material at times. The action hasn’t aged as well as The Avengers, and those movies are better at giving every member of the team their time to shine. Revisiting X2 also reminds me of things that stuck out at the time, like how much the nonwhite actors were consistently pushed aside in these movies (Kelly Hu is real pretty and gets a great fight scene, but seriously, why is she even here?). Even Alan Cumming’s wonderful Nightcrawler is a bit too self-serious, and takes a back seat to the Fit Hot Guys Have Problems Too conflicts of Bobby and Logan. Rewatching in 2023, it’s also hard to forget the offscreen actions of its director, especially when Shawn Ashmore, around 23 but playing the teenaged Bobby, gets a lot of the implied sexuality. Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are selling their old-exes chemistry for all it’s worth, and the movie wouldn’t work without it, but they’re not allowed anything more than subtext. (To be fair, the comics have been refusing to pull that particular trigger for decades, so we can’t really expect more than that.)

X2 is still a lot of fun, though, and everyone really is quite beautiful. Rebecca Romijn spends a distressing amount of time in nothing but blue body paint, but she does look damn good in it, and her Mystique is a delightful trickster, just sadistic enough. Watching her seduce and iron-enrich a deeply unpleasant security guard is a delight even before we know what she’s up to. (McKellen gets to finish him off, literally and metaphorically, with an absolutely delicious line reading of, “Never trust a beautiful woman. Especially one who’s interested in you.”) The prison break scene is, for my money, one of the best comic book movie action sequences of all time; not just for its visuals but for its creativity. It’s not about bombast or explosions; the violence comes from the creative use of just a tiny bit of metal. 

 X2 is at its best at times like that; scenes that aren’t typical punchfests and that play to the strengths of its cast. McKellen is a king regaining his throne during the breakout and gets to show off his full range, from “profoundly weakened prisoner” to “comics’ cattiest bitch.” Hugh Jackman gets maybe the funniest joke in the movie, when he answers the question of what he teaches at the School for Mutants with a single word: “Art.” Halle Berry doesn’t get nearly enough to do, but even she has some lovely scenes with Cumming about anger, hope, and faith. It’s fun to watch the team work together when their jet is attacked, especially when Magneto comes in for the save. Even the smaller character moments are well-thought out and fun — the actors who get to be Mystique-in-disguise for a moment are a blast; I especially like Brian Cox waving gleefully goodbye to “himself” in the third act.

And while I did mock Logan and Bobby’s problems, the not-at-all subtle parallels between the mutants’ oppression and prejudice and real life still work pretty well, and give the movie its grounding. The past few years of attacks on queer kids makes the stakes seem even higher during the raid on the School for Mutants, accompanied by nature documentary narration about vulnerable young. We see the politics — then and now — of Bobby’s own brother ratting him out to the cops, Pyro’s eventual explosion into wholly understandable violence, and Mystique’s refusal to hide because “we shouldn’t have to.” Most painfully, we watch Bobby’s family standing together, forever apart from him, as he flees, and General Stryker’s destruction of his own child. While the connection between queerness and mutantkind in X2 is obvious, it’s not heavy-handed enough to drag the movie down (Anna Paquin would later star in True Blood, a series that was not nearly so effective at threading the needle). I do wish, however, that the Fox movies did what the X-comics occasionally do, and spent a little time on the more “ordinary” mutants, the ones whose powers are damn close to useless. Taking extra-legal police action against innocent civilians with superpowers is still wrong, but not as horrifying as taking extra-legal police action against people who have a funny patch of skin on the back of their knees or a slightly longer neck. It’s another one for my mental list of missed opportunities.

Maybe because I was never as big a fan of the Avengers as I was — and am — of the X-Men, I forgive the MCU for more than I can Fox in their adaptation choices. Maybe it’s because Marvel was more confident in rewriting and recreating their own mythology. Maybe it’s because Marvel had more time to expand their universe beyond those fit hot (white) guys with problems, while Fox’s franchise increasingly became The Adventures of Logan and Sometimes His Pals. (I’ll similarly not forgive Days of Future Past for sidelining Elliot Page’s Kitty Pryde in favor of Yet More Adventures With Logan, This Time Even Bigger And Muscular Than Last Time.) Honestly, every time I rewatch this, I’m annoyed that Kurt didn’t get to be blue and fuzzy. That’s the way it goes when you grew up with a franchise, though. Fandom is fickle, and I’m too close to be objective. At the end of the day, I’m still glad X2 exists. 

Stray thoughts:

It’s fun rewatching this knowing that comics-Bobby is now canonically gay as hell.

Another reason these movies haven’t aged as well: finding out that James Marsden is incredibly charming when he’s not playing Scott. They did Cyclops dirty in these movies, and I hate Cyclops.

For more on X2‘s vision of Nightcrawler, check out this piece from Consciousink