X2 (2003)

Most people think so. 84% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 76%.

Professor Charles Xavier and his team of genetically gifted superheroes face a rising tide of anti-mutant sentiment led by Col. William Stryker. Storm, Wolverine and Jean Grey must join their usual nemeses—Magneto and Mystique—to unhinge Stryker's scheme to exterminate all mutants. Wikipedia ↗

X2: X-Men United is a 2003 American superhero film directed by Bryan Singer, widely considered the finest entry in the original X-Men trilogy and one of the best superhero sequels ever made. Following an assassination attempt on the President by the teleporting mutant Nightcrawler, the military scientist Colonel William Stryker, played by Brian Cox, launches an assault on the X-Mansion and kidnaps Professor Xavier, intending to use him and a replica of Cerebro to locate and kill every mutant on Earth. The X-Men and Magneto's Brotherhood must form an unprecedented alliance to stop Stryker's genocide.

X2 expanded and deepened every element that made the first film successful — the action was bigger, the character development richer, and the political allegory more pointed, with Stryker's anti-mutant crusade explicitly paralleling real-world persecution of minorities. The opening sequence, in which Nightcrawler teleports through White House security to reach the Oval Office in a balletic display of acrobatic violence, remains one of the most inventive and thrilling openings in superhero cinema. The film explored Wolverine's mysterious past, Iceman's coming-out scene with his parents, and Jean Grey's growing powers — seeding the Dark Phoenix storyline that would play out in subsequent films.

X2 earned $407 million worldwide and demonstrated that superhero sequels could be more ambitious and thematically rich than their predecessors.