Mutation nation

Whatever you do, don't miss the beginning of Bryan Singer's X-Men 2. It is an amazing bit of science-fiction cinema: a classic-to-be. Inside the White House, the US Presidency is suddenly invaded by mutants with prehensile tails. They storm through locked doors and solid walls, toss security men up to the ceiling, dodge bullets in blurs of hyperspeed, leap like kangaroos into the Oval Office, pinion the impotent chief executive to his historic desk and deliver their own Declaration of Independence signed Mutant Liberation Front.

It is like an adrenaline rush: balletic in style, ballistic in tempo, bombastic in effect. It raises only one serious misgiving: can the rest of the film live up to it? It has a good try, but overdoes it.

It seeks to make up in running-time (too long), CGi effects (too many) and plot (too much) what this compact and brilliantly designed set-piece achieves with an effortless elegance.

The next few scenes have their moments, mostly witty, to let us get our breath back. A cheeky kid on a museum tour sticks his tongue out at a prissy little girl: the tongue is forked. A teenager whose lighter is swiped by a college bully snorts a jet of fire from his nostrils and blackens the guy's stubble.

An entire room a-buzz with people is frozen into petrified silence to allow Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the world's most powerful bald telepath, a private confab with his pupils from the X-Mansion, an Ivy League prep school where mutant juveniles with magical powers are being tutored in ruling the universe.

Yah-boo, Hogwarts; America has her own wizards' academy now. When we cut back to the Oval Office, an anti-mutant militarist named Commander Stryker (Brian Cox), but obviously akin to Donald Rumsfeld, is urging his shaken leader into attack mode.

"Okay," concedes the prez, "so long as I don't see bodies on the six o'clock news."

X-Men 2 is an undisguised paean of praise to American imperialism. Its story comes from the retro-world of pulp comics. But its Alpha sampling of futuristic beings are All-American (even the ones played by British stars) in spite of their claws, hooves, tails, hide or horns, and seem to be delivering a state-oftheworld message. "Don't mess with us," it says.

As Professor Xavier (Stewart) puts it, "I pity whoever comes to our Mansion looking for trouble" - Dubya would endorse that. Commander Stryker comes with his commandos, and the gifted children-flee their co-ed dorms and reunite to do battle for man and mutantkind.

One reason the film is so unreasonably long is to allow every star player equipped with a supernatural talent to apply it with full-force CGi pay-off. Thus Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has a furry hairdo and retractable claws.

Magneto (Ian McKellen) can turn metal into rust and must be imprisoned by the villain in a cell of Perspex plastic; Storm (Halle Berry) whistles up bad weather; Cyclops (James Marsden), with wraparound shades, harbours an energy beam that slices through mountains.