X-Files: I Want to Believe
0
Posted
July 31, 2008 in
Film
Inessential and bone-headed, this six-years-too-late second X-Files movie written and directed by series creator Chris Carter isn’t even as good/bad as a marathon episode. Lacking aliens, Bigfoots, and brains, it’s merely a Very Special Episode of CSI. Someone’s slashing up West Virginia and Scully (Gillian Anderson) has been pressed to enlist the estranged Mulder (David Duchovny), who’s avoided the FBI ever since that nasty time they sentenced him to death for murder. We’re under the impression they haven’t seen each other in ages—she’s awkward, he’s bearded—but after one instance of goo-goo eyes and zero instances of pleasant conversation, a scene finds them postcoital spooning with an upside down book spelling “SEX” on the cover, in case we were in doubt. Carter assumes we’ll care despite the absence of their once combustible chemistry. We don’t, and we don’t fall for his romantic red herring of Amanda Peet either. Meanwhile, there are violent Russians and a possibly psychic, definitely pedophilic priest (Billy Connolly) with a suspiciously good homing instinct for severed limbs. Scully, now a doctor, also struggles to heal a terminally ill child (Marco Niccoli)—the film’s best scene is when she announces she’ll perform a stem cell transplant that afternoon and immediately rushes to Google it. Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz have penned one of the year’s dumbest flicks as Scully and Mulder flounder about trying to solve a mystery that could have been unraveled with a day’s decent detective work and is so astounding ludicrous, I’m tempted to spoil it here but won’t as it will ruin the one glimmer of fun for audiences able to lambaste it themselves. (Amy Nicholson)
Inessential and bone-headed, this six-years-too-late second X-Files movie written and directed by series creator Chris Carter isn’t even as good/bad as a marathon episode. Lacking aliens, Bigfoots, and brains, it’s merely a Very Special Episode of CSI. Someone’s slashing up West Virginia and Scully (Gillian Anderson) has been pressed to enlist the estranged Mulder (David Duchovny), who’s avoided the FBI ever since that nasty time they sentenced him to death for murder. We’re under the impression they haven’t seen each other in ages—she’s awkward, he’s bearded—but after one instance of goo-goo eyes and zero instances of pleasant conversation, a scene finds them postcoital spooning with an upside down book spelling “SEX” on the cover, in case we were in doubt. Carter assumes we’ll care despite the absence of their once combustible chemistry. We don’t, and we don’t fall for his romantic red herring of Amanda Peet either. Meanwhile, there are violent Russians and a possibly psychic, definitely pedophilic priest (Billy Connolly) with a suspiciously good homing instinct for severed limbs. Scully, now a doctor, also struggles to heal a terminally ill child (Marco Niccoli)—the film’s best scene is when she announces she’ll perform a stem cell transplant that afternoon and immediately rushes to Google it. Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz have penned one of the year’s dumbest flicks as Scully and Mulder flounder about trying to solve a mystery that could have been unraveled with a day’s decent detective work and is so astounding ludicrous, I’m tempted to spoil it here but won’t as it will ruin the one glimmer of fun for audiences able to lambaste it themselves. (Amy Nicholson)
