Make no mistake about it, if you happened to be home with a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night in the mid- to late 90’s, “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” would have been a perfectly fine episode to satisfy Mulder and Scully fans.
But after 10 years of being away from the big screen, Chris Carter’s latest dark adventure with everyone’s favorite paranormal paramours will no doubt leave devotees feeling a little underwhelmed.
“I Want to Believe” functions as a wholly stand-alone episode that doesn’t necessarily require viewers be intimately familiar with the X-Files universe, but there’s little in this body-snatching cat and mouse game to attract audiences outside the television series’ steadfast following.
Times have changed at the FBI – Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) have been out of the loop a long time and portraits of a grinning George W. Bush now adorn the hallways.
But when a female agent goes missing and the only lead the FBI has is a pedophile priest who claims to be experiencing visions of abductions, they immediately get on the horn to the only person they know who can track down “Spooky Mulder.”
Scully has her own problems, however, trying to save a young cancer victim in her care while also battling a heartless hospital administrator who wants to ship the poor kid off to a hospice and the loving arms of the almighty.
Nevertheless, Scully does convince her old partner that he needs to get back in the game, and before long the duo is out and about battling demons both within and without, just like old times.
That’s not to say that the supernatural or extraterrestrial quotient is particularly high this time around – it’s not. The fiends running amok throughout this particular X-File are thoroughly human, albeit perverse.
All of Carter’s trademark creepy shadows and jittery flashlights are in evidence here, and they work together to provide for some nightmarish sequences, but the strongest drama comes from Scully’s abhorrence of Father Joe – the child-molesting padre with 37 victims under his belt.
It takes a thoroughly likable actor/comedian like Billy Connolly to elicit any kind of empathy for a character like that.
Mulder’s fine with hanging out with the twisted clergyman just so long as there’s a possibility his strange visions are truly otherworldly, but Scully despises the man and despises herself even more for needing his help.
There are a few moments thrown in here and there ostensibly to reward X-Files fans for shelling out $10 or more to see their heroes on the big screen – there just aren’t enough of them.
Yeah, Dana and Fox are shown in bed together and crusty old Skinner does show up to aid uncharacteristic comfort, but again, after a decade you’d figure that there’d be something more.
Sadly, “I Want to Believe” could easily be applied to those fans who went into the movie hoping that this X-Files would be great.
Maybe it’s time the whole gang returned to TV where they belong.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Directed by Chris Carter and starring Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny and Amanda Peet. Rated PG-13. Runtime 100 minutes.
