Logan Is The Better Film, But X2 Is The Best X-Men Movie

What elements make a great X-Men movie? That's undoubtedly a question that's bouncing around the boardrooms at Marvel Studios these days, as Kevin Feige and his collaborators prepare to incorporate the mutant characters into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A few of those mutants appears in "Deadpool & Wolverine," and to mark the release of that film, a few of my colleagues and I sat down and tried to determine a group list of the top five X-Men movies so far.

Obvious stinkers like "Dark Phoenix," "X-Men: Apocalypse," and "X-Men: The Last Stand" were quickly tossed out of contention, and after a while, we narrowed things down to the clear top two options: James Mangold's haunting modern Western "Logan" and Bryan Singer's spectacular "X2." You might immediately think "Logan" would be the clear winner — and if we were judging which of these is the best overall movie, you'd be right. "Logan" was the first superhero movie to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and it gave Hugh Jackman a perfect send-off as a character he helped define for mass audiences. 

But "Logan" also spends a lot of its runtime deconstructing genre tropes and riffing on relationships and character dynamics we had spent more than 15 years with when it was released in 2017. Those decisions work wonderfully in the context of the movie, but when crafting a list of the top films in the franchise, there's almost too much history in "Logan" for it to make sense at number one. It's not fully representative of what a majority of these movies are or are trying to be.

Attempting to put aside the fact that director Bryan Singer has had accusations of heinous behavior levied against him which have basically gotten him booted out of Hollywood, "X2" is a massive step up in quality from the first movie and, along with Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 2" in 2004, helped set a new standard for what a great superhero movie could look and feel like. The action is tremendous (shout-out to Nightcrawler in the White House, and the attack on the X-Mansion), the ensemble of performers are all doing excellent work (especially Brian Cox as the villainous William Stryker), and the script also provides room to explore the central theme of X-Men as members of a marginalized community; the queer allegory is most apparent in the scene at Iceman's family home, which is the type of quiet, human-focused interaction that makes the bombastic action work so well in contrast. And when you've got actors like Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen doing 360° windmill dunks and draining threes left and right (metaphorically speaking), it's hard to get any better than that.

You can listen to our full discussion on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which is embedded below:

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