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The X-Files: I Want To Believe, Directed by Chris Carter, starring Billy Connolly, Amanda Peet, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Rating: M – Violence

By Steve Newall

The title of this surprising exhumation doesn’t just speak to the personality of Fox Mulder and his poster-friendly philosophy but to damn near everyone that’s going to see it I’d imagine.

After all, there’s not a strong scientific explanation as to why anyone would drop hard-earned cash (or even an hour and a half of their life in the case of the full media screening) on this flick, The X-Files having gone from pop culture phenomenon to a blueprint for shows like Lost as to what they shouldn’t do over the increasingly disappointing course of its existence. So we sit there, Wanting To Believe, choosing to put our misplaced faith back in the hands of Chris Carter again, and hoping for the best.

It seems so good on paper too, with Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) coaxed out of retirement to assist in finding a fellow FBI agent who has mysteriously disappeared — something a psychic paedophile priest (Billy Connolly) seems to know more about than he should — and placing the scenario right back in monster-of-the-week X-Files territory. Gone is any convoluted alien storyline, which is great, we don’t need to be teased by that never-paying-off mythology any more thanks, and instead there’s a supposed focus on chills and thrills.

Supposed? Well, now we come to the hard bit, the part where we’re let down. Not by Duchovny, nor Anderson, both of whom jump back into their roles with apparent ease, but by Carter and the bad habits he’s brought with him from the telly world. Hampered by routine direction and an aura of cheapness, which is particularly odd given the relatively constrained storyline and lack of budget evident on screen, I Want To Believe looks more like a made-for-TV movie than a feature film. Not that this would matter if we were able to immerse ourselves back into what made the show so great in its first few years.

Sadly, Carter has forgotten, and makes too many desperate attempts to revisit the past instead of focusing on the bigger goal of making a decent stand-alone movie. I mean, do we really need to see Scully stubbornly refusing to accept Mulder’s non-scientific explanations for the hundredth time? Do they need to disagree, go their separate ways in a huff, inevitably and conveniently ending up back on the same page in the story’s climax? It was frustrating enough on TV — on the big screen it comes across as annoying padding to stretch a small idea to feature length, something that happened in several ways over the course of the film’s unnecessarily elaborate plot.

By the time we get to the third act and a genuinely gruesome, X-Files-worthy dash of scientific experimentation, it’s all too little too late. We’ve all been strung along again, and before you know it the movie’s over without much in the way of cinematic crescendo. And instead of any sense of lingering dread — or better yet, celebration — you’re wondering where in the theatre the TV remote is. There’s bound to be something better on another channel…

See trailer for X-Files: I Want To Believe here