Rainy days can be good movie days. I made it to the morning matinee of X2 as the previews were in progress. One of them was for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, starring Sean Connery, whose character I mistook for an older Indiana Jones.

The sequel was a definite improvement over the first one. The writing was better (if that's saying much), but the main attraction was the action sequences and special effects. The movie introduced a few new mutants (new to the film, not the comic book) and hinted at a few other ones (hidden treasure for the savvy).

Kelly Hu played Yuriko Oyama, a mutant whose abilities seemed to be cracking her knuckles and looking good. She had three or four lines in the entire film. Her true powers were eventually revealed during a fight sequence that made me wince... repeatedly.

The best addition had to be Alan Cumming, who played Kurt Wagner, a.k.a. Nightcrawler, an acrobatic mutant with the ability to teleport practically anywhere. His action scenes at the beginning of the movie were spectacular and very smoky.

Just beyond the halfway point, one could already catch a whiff of X3. Of course, as soon as I think about third installments, The Lord of the Rings comes to mind. Can it get here already?