As with the second installments of the Harry Potter and Star Wars (Mk. II) franchises, X2 -- the sequel, it need be said, to 2000’s X-Men -- represents a significant improvement over its predecessor, and yet still manages to be more or less worthless. X2 has a fairly intelligible plot, even after it’s chopped into pieces and cross-cut willy-nilly, reasonably good acting, dialogue that at least avoids X-Men’s howlers ("The same thing that happens to everything else," indeed) and some pretty nifty visual effects. But where a good, or even a passable, movie ought to start, X2 stops. There’s not a scintilla of imagination in it -- only "imagination" of the Hollywood kind, which means finding new camera angles from which to shoot the exploding police car, or yet another stratagem to break out of the seemingly impenetrable prison. OK, that last one’s actually kinda neat.

Bryan Singer -- the overrating of whose The Usual Suspects ought to rank as one of the greater critical embarrassments of the 1990s -- never showed himself to be more than a modestly promising director, but even as a minor talent, he's slumming it here. That's not to say that great care didn't go into devising the wisps of blue ectoplasm that appear every time the blue-skinned Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming, with a German accent left over from Cabaret) teleports. It's more to say, who cares? Who cares how shiny the buttons are when the suit is full of holes?

We pick up the story where X-Men left off -- almost literally, since the movie ended with little more than a plug for its pre-ordained sequel. (X2, incidentally, repeats the insult, closing with what amounts to a trailer for the inevitable X3.) In X2, Bruce Davison's bad Senator is replaced with Brian Cox's mutant-hating General Stryker, who'd prefer to skip the registration and confinement and just wipe mutants off the face of the earth. (His motivations, it will shock exactly no one to learn, are personal.) This, not surprisingly, sits well with neither Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) nor the imprisoned Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen). Comic-book fans might know them better as Professor X and Magneto, but there's no discernible pattern to when X2's characters are called by their real names and when by their superheroic/villainous aliases -- not to mention the fact that some only seem to possess one or the other.

That might seem like a minor detail (and it isn't, really; think how weird it is to have one character named Storm and another named Jean), but it underlines X2's basic discomfort with the genre. Singer clearly takes himself too seriously to film a straight-up superhero tale, as if fantasy were only for the weak-minded (when, in fact, the reverse is closer to true). But a "realistic" story involving people who shoot force beams out of their eyes is an obvious absurdity, at least unless you take the game a lot further than Singer's limited imagination is willing to go. (Comic-book writer Alan Moore took a more provocative stab at the subject in his much-ballyhooed Watchmen, and even better, in the underrated Miracleman.) If X2 succeeds more on its own terms than its predecessor, it's at least in part because those terms are so reduced -- the movie's last hour is essentially one long, awkwardly intercut series of climaxes, like a D.W. Griffith two-reeler gone amok.

Plotwise, X2 turns on one of the oldest structures in the book: Split your heroes up early, have them spend most of the movie getting back together, hashing out some personal differences along the way, and then reunite them for a wham-bang finish. (Thus the "united" part of X-Men United, the subtitle Fox has somewhat desperately tried to attach in the days before opening. I sympathize, since X2 is an ugly clunker of a title -- to say nothing of the inevitable video-store confusion with XXX and its upcoming sequel, XXX2 -- but if it ain't on the screen, it ain't in the title.) In this case, we get more unrequited touchy-feely between Jean (Famke Janssen) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), as well as some not-quite-as-repressed smoochies between Rogue (Anna Paquin) and Bobby (Shawn Ashmore). (See what I mean about those names?) There's something almost frighteningly apt about the way X2 is so perfectly tailored to the teenage male libido. On the one hand, you've got Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, as shape-changer Mystique, stripped as naked as a Maxim cover girl; on the other, a world where even kisses are fraught with danger, and only the bad girl (Mystique again) even gets to think about having sex. Don't accuse Singer and co. of not knowing their target audience.

X2 clumsily introduces a flame-wielding tyro named Pyro (Tadpole's Aaron Stanford), who causes a hell of a conflagration right at the movie's middle, and then up and disappears from its climax. He'll be back, of course, as will most of the movie's other characters, even the ones who are supposed to be dead. But where each installment of The Lord of the Rings has crammed enough in to bring a sense of finality even as it points the way to the next film, X2 still feels like a prologue. No matter how much goes on, you feel like nothing has happened.