Intermission: Summer sequels run gamut from good to ugly

Jim Wunderle is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.

As surely as Memorial Day signifies the beginning of summer, summer itself signifies the beginning of Hollywood's sequel season. The sequel, as a bona fide movie industry commodity, runs the gamut from the good to the bad to the downright ugly.

This season has some of all three. Here's the list: "The Matrix Reloaded" and part three (shot at the same time) "The Matrix Revolutions," "Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle," "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," "Tomb Raider 2," Bad Boys 2," "2 Fast 2 Furious," "Legally Blonde 2," "American Wedding: American Pie 3" and finally a film whose title sums up some studio honcho's mental ability green-lighting it, "Dumb and Dumber: When Harry Met Lloyd."

These filmmakers couldn't muster the dough to get Jim Carrey or Jeff Daniels back so they've cast unknowns in the lead. Top that off with ads that say "Opening Joon 13th."

"Dumbest" would be more appropriate.

But first out of the gate is "X2: X-Men United." Director Bryan Singer (who deserves a lifetime achievement award on the strength of his brilliant "The Usual Suspects") returns with an enlarged cast, a hefty budget and a built-in audience for his sequel to one of the best films based on a comic book ever made.

This time around, though, he's got a few problems. Most of these arise from the formula that film companies turn to when making a sequel: More characters, special effects favored over plot and pedantic sequences featuring the characters who "tested well" with audiences of the original film. "X2" suffers from all of these.

Singer is a great director and manages to keep things brisk throughout, but with the addition of several new mutants, there are just too many principal characters.

This formula can manifest itself in two different ways. Either the film will be interminably long, trying to give each character his due, or the plot will seem to be watered down. In the case of "X2," it's the latter. I never really got engaged with any of the characters this time, even ones I was familiar with from the first episode.

The underlying theme of both "X-Men" films is a parable about tolerance in the new millennium. There is a reactionary wing of "normal" humans who see these mutants as a threat to our way of life. These beings possess, in their very bodies, weapons of mass destruction.

On the other side, some of the mutants not the ones who have been tutored by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) resent this treatment and feel they are just continuing the age-old process of the evolution of the human race. Not everyone believes in evolution, though.

In the first installment the "good" mutants in Professor X's camp were pitted against the "bad" ones who follow Ian McKellen's character "Magneto." In "X2" both sides get together to quell an insidious plot being masterminded by a certified mutant-hating military man.

General William Stryker has enlisted the help of a particularly unstable mutant to attempt a presidential assassination. Stryker knows this will enflame the growing fear the masses have of the mutants and will make it easier to install the "Mutant Registration Act" that many are calling for.

The Professor X/Magneto alliance is a shaky one but both sides realize they must capitulate if they are to survive. Magneto has toned down his utter disgust for the way he and his kind have been treated, and the professor seems to get the point that maybe he can't be the mutant Mahatma Ghandi.

So, together, they must do what must be done.

My previous criticism of character development aside, there is one wry scene that shows how this movie could have been developed.

Bobby Drake, The Iceman, goes to see his parents. Despite the fact they've raised him from birth, they are unaware he is "different." His confession is a dead-on statement about coming to grips with things that aren't known, or are not topics for discussion, between parent and child. "Have you ever considered, well... not being a mutant?" Bobby's mother asks.

Marvel Comics, the originator of the X-Men, was always great about showing the human foibles and flaws of its superheroes. Much more so than the goody-goody way the DC Comics Group presented Superman, Batman, et al.

Reading my first Marvel comic was a defining moment in my life, and while I don't really keep up with the magazines anymore, I understand the profound influence these characters had on those of us who make up the "atomic-age baby boom" generation.

"X2" has been corrupted by the studio system but if you are a fan of the genre, it's worth a look. Myself, I can't wait until Ang Lee who directed "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Ice Storm" and "Sense and Sensibility" brings his version of "The Hulk" to screens on June 20.