Cable! Domino! Shatterstar! Warpath! Cannonball! Deathlok! Exclamation Points! Explosions! Sound effects! What more could it be but another grimacing shout into the edges of the page with X-Force. The second issue of the four-part mini-series rushes through its second issue courtesy of writer Ed Brisson, artist Dylan Burnett and colorist Jesus Aburtov.

The Eastern European nation of Transia is believed to be a safe haven for Mutants. So it’s kind of a shock to find out their military is killing them with weapons from the future thanks to the work of the sinister Commandant Constantin. An armored caravan carrying mutants deep in Transia is attacked by the heroes. A young Cable runs into workplace issues with the vicious twin-blades of Shatterstar as Commandant Constantin deals with certain stresses involving a certain displaced ally from the far future.

Ed Brisson tries his best to handle subtlety AND complexity in a story featuring WAY too many heroes and semi-heroes. He might have a pretty solid handle on the chainsaws he’s juggling in this time travel mutant action drama, but there’s never enough time with any one character to feel remotely satisfying and the overall run of the action feels a bit too familiar to be satisfying in and of itself. That being said, the pulse of the action DOES feel brisk enough to maintain enough momentum to keep all the action from getting terminally dull in 20-plus pages of plot development.

Dylan Burnett’s angular action is as dizzily kinetic as ever. Emotion is incredibly amplified in aggressively explosive action sequences accompanied by long-winded blocks of dialogue that cling to the corners of the panels for fear of getting caught in the crossfire and bursting into a shower of consonants and vowels. It’s beautiful stuff in action, but Brunett isn’t capturing the less aggressive and percussive drama with enough non-explosive intensity to anchor-in the deeper complexities of Brisson’s quieter moments of exposition. It’s really too bad that the moody dramatic elements of the issue aren’t handled with the right kind of tension.

Burnett’s heavy inking doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for Aburtov to develop color. It doesn’t help that so much fo the action is taking place in the frozen Eastern European Transian tundra. White and muted winter coldness dominate much of the issue punctuated by the orange explosions of gunfire that never seem warm enough to make much of an impression. Aburtov IS allowed some space to develop some very beautiful purple arcs of energy for a time vortex in the basement of the Transian Federal House, which adds a brutal and appealing sense of the fantastic to the issue.

Brisson and Burnett are rushing from action to action amidst time travel and interpersonal politics of power and authority. It’s kind of fun to watch from a distance, but without enough time to really engage any of the characters, this mini-series is leaning REALLY heavily on the history of the popular characters to draw-in the reader. There isn’t enough impact in the story that’s being told here to make any one of the characters seem terribly interesting beyond the rush of instability that welcomes aggression and explosion to nearly every page.

GRADE: C