Don’t blame the Syndicate, Black Oil, Alex Krycek or the Cigarette Smoking Man. For the travesty that is The X-Files: I Want to Believe, you can blame Chris Carter.
In 2002, X-Files creator Carter ended the pop-culture-molding science-fiction series on a fitting note: During the two-hour series finale, “The Truth,” FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny, Californication) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson, Straightheads), finally a romantic couple, are on the run from the government, which has closed the X-Files for the third time and is trying to kill Mulder. The pair may have been robbed of its life’s work, but at least the two are together, having survived everything and anything the aliens, the government or the aliens working with the government has thrown at them. Everything was mysterious – nothing was answered for sure, and it was all very X-Files.
So for Carter to twist and turn upside-down that fitting series finale with I Want to Believe is a wholly unnecessary blasphemy. While Duchovny and Anderson still have their acting chops – and, thankfully, that unmistakable chemistry – this film isn’t a proper avenue for them. A lame idea, a boring script and some forced musings about Catholicism versus science all tread on familiar ground, giving viewers a disappointing sense of déjà vu. Was this what we waited six years for? What a bummer.
Here’s the deal: Six years after the series finale takes place, Mulder is a loner (shocking), living in an abandoned, gated home in the middle of the forest somewhere, while Scully is a doctor at a Catholic hospital grappling between her religious beliefs and her scientific training (again, shocking). When an FBI agent goes missing, fellow agents Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet, Martian Child) and Mosley Drummy (rapper Xzibit, Pimp My Ride) go to Scully for help, asking her to appeal to Mulder and bring him in on the case.
Hence starts a struggle of sorts between Mulder and Scully. The former insists on relying on a Catholic priest and convicted pedophile, Joseph Fitzpatrick Crissman (Billy Connolly, Fido), who claims he is receiving psychic visions of the missing agent and other girls, while the latter is disgusted by Crissman and dismisses him as a sham. Add in some moral tests for Scully – wait, could Crissman be telling the truth after all? – and Mulder’s obsession with solving the case as a way to cope with never being able to find his sister, Samantha, and you get all the tried-and-tired plot twists Carter loves relying on. Can you tell where this is going?
It’s sad Carter had to pull the series in this direction, as the film – which uses a “monster-of-the-week” type format instead of dealing with one of the larger mytharcs – could have been great, as another exploration of Mulder and Scully’s relationship or as a look at the importance of their work in an age without the X-Files. But instead, there are no monsters as cool as Eugene Tooms, no psychological exploration as creepy as “Home” and no scene as fantastically satisfying as Mulder and Scully’s first kiss. It’s merely a dragged out, boring mess with a ludicrously unbelievable plot (and that’s saying a lot, considering the whole basis of the franchise is unbelievable things) that collapses under its own lack of weight.
Even more depressing are how good Duchovny and Anderson still are and how wasted their talents are in this slop (Peet, however, does not have this problem; she decidedly delivers the worst acting the film has to offer). Duchovny is still pitch-perfect as Mulder, a bearded and reclusive man of J.D. Salinger-like proportions, while Anderson is continually cool, confident and cruel as Scully, and so skeptical it hurts. They excel at slipping back into their complicated, complex roles, and it’s obvious what Carter wants to discover about their relationship: Without the X-Files, what are Mulder and Scully? Do they simply become a couple known as Fox and Dana? Or do they become nothing at all?
But these questions are far too weighty, far too existential to be properly answered within I Want to Believe. Instead, Carter gives us a mediocre, unfulfilling film that could have been edited down from a full-length movie to a standard 40-minute episode – and even then, it still would have been one of the worst episodes in the bunch. And that includes the ones with Robert Patrick as Agent John Doggett.
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RATING: 1 1/2 out of 5 Stars
