Director Bryan Singer skilfully keeps multiple subplots spinning while moving inexorably towards a climax that puts the first film's Liberty Island sequence in the shade.
The plotting seems dangerously self-interested, being concerned almost exclusively with the survival of the mutants themselves, and, behind the succulent effects, the tone is oddly hectoring.
X2's excessively complicated and character-crammed plot, which only a teen boy could care about enough to follow closely, has a nasty human bigwig (Brian Cox) fomenting a war against the mutants.
