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Both Raimi and Singer prove astonishingly adept at staging forceful and vigorous action sequences that serve the dual purposes of offering up the spectacle the audience has come to see, and carrying the story forward in the midst of all the flash and smash. After multiple viewings, the subway car fight between Doc Ock and Spider-Man has now taken its place among my all-time favorite action scenes. Raimi and his cinematographer Bill Pope find the balance between the claustrophobia of the fight in and on the top of the out of control car, and the wide-open city spaces that loom just out of reach, but that seem to offer Spider-Man his only hope at slowing down the vehicle before everyone inside is hurtled to their death at the end of the line. The emotional payoff at the end is the clincher, however, a reminder of how Spider-Man is one of the few heroes embraced by the public at large. The dynamic of that relationship, how it both tests and redeems Spider-Man, is at the emotional heart of Spider-Man 2.

Back to that running time on X2. The first and third films clock in at barely over an hour-and-a-half after closing credits are subtracted out. Whatever other flaws they may separately rate, they both suffer from the strain of cramming in more than a dozen heroes and at least as many villains and giving them all something to do. X2 uses its extended length wisely, first by reducing its mutant “villains” roster down to Magneto and Mystique and positing the corrupt and mad General Stryker as the center of the heart of darkness. X2 throws in just enough emotion and character-driven moments in the first half (love how Wolverine lets Iceman hand-chill his beverage as a symbol of détente between the two) that Singer is able to indulge the final hour as one extended action set piece, with ever-increasing levels of climax. That it proves exhausting, but not wearying, even with notable visual referencing to The Last Temptation of Christ’s closing moments included in the mix, is a testament to Singer’s skill at staging moments of never-flagging momentum.

My choice for the best action sequence in X2 would have to be the night attack on the School for Gifted Children. Singer, like Raimi, refuses to chop this scene into bursts of violence and terror devoid of any sense of where our heroes stand in relation to the threat they face. The audience has been given some sense of the layout here and even going back to X-Men, and the scene feels like it plays fair with that design.

Normally, I squawk about the level of violence that PG-13 films get away solely by refraining from showing blood. Here though, even as Wolverine slaughters somewhere around three dozen covert military personnel with nary a flicker of viscera, the sound design and Hugh Jackman’s forceful presence render the notion of visible bloodshed moot. When we hear his claws tear into some anonymous intruder, or chop down a trio of hapless goons in one fell swoop, it’s both exhilarating and disconcerting.

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