Movie Review - 'The X-Files: I Want to Believe'

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, and Amanda Peet
Directed by Chris Carter
Rated PG-13

There's definitely wishful thinking in the title of the new X-Files movie. Ten years after the first film and nearly a decade after the finale of the landmark series we get The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Fans who have missed the show and even casual viewers who admired its constant risk taking and envelope pushing probably want to believe. So did I.

For the better part of an hour, The X-Files delivers on its promise, and not surprisingly, it tapers off a little after that. This feels like an extended episode, which is not meant to slight the film at all, because for many years, this show was among television's best written dramas. But because of the dramatic weight of the story - which I'll go to great lengths not to spoil - I Want to Believe engages is a couple of subplots, neither particularly compelling, with one feeling as if it's added to address fan questions and the other that may have some allegorical connection to the main thrust of the plot, but which is unmasked as hokey pretty early on.

Still, there are certain bonds that can't be broken, and for whatever the past few years have done to the careers of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson individually, they're an indispensable team. The chemistry, almost automatic at the beginning of the series and more palpable the longer the show aired on Fox, is back in a heartbeat here. These two actors are very at home in the world of creator-director Chris Carter, and should there be more films, I would expect I'd be equally excited to see them.

But many years have passed since we last saw the intrepid investigators of the paranormal. Fox Mulder is more or less off the grid, as they say, and Dana Scully is now a surgeon at a Catholic hospital. But the FBI needs Mulder's help. They have been relying on a priest-turned-psychic (Billy Connolly) to assist them in a search for a missing agent. At first, the Bureau doesn't take Father Joe seriously. After all, he has a very shady past. But when he correctly unearths a severed arm in the middle of a snowy field in West Virginia, some of the agents want to believe, too.

The FBI wants to use Mulder's experience to help determine whether or not Father Joe is a crackpot. Could he have intimate knowledge of the case, or is God really speaking through him?

What it all means - the severed arm, the pieces of the mystery they uncover - is very gruesome stuff, actually, but it's also right up the alley of The X-Files. Carter places clues carefully, and takes us on a pretty taut intellectual journey. Even when you see more, you almost have to be told what it all means. There are mysteries where you know more than the characters, and that, as Hitchcock said, is what creates tension. But this works pretty well, too.

Carter has always had an exceptional eye for casting, and Billy Connolly is a superb choice as father Joe. He gets some mileage out of Xzibit and Amanda Peet as FBI agents on opposite sides of the coin, and even the tiniest of roles never seems out of joint with its surroundings.

As for the troublesome subplots, it does fit the structure of The X-Files to have concurrent storylines. That's not the problem. The problem is the way they're massaged into place here. They don't feel the least bit organic, but instead, very deliberate, as if there's some ground Carter didn't cover in the series and felt compelled to now. These pesky dead ends hobble an otherwise absorbing little detective story with two detectives I wouldn't mind seeing a dozen more times.