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The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: PG-13
Current Showtimes: No showtimes available

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is a sequel that comes ten years after the first X-Files film, a fairly successful big screen version, which was made in the waning years of that cult Fox network series. While it’s interesting to see where screen writers Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz take their main characters, agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, this new film feels like an ordinary, made for television film that explores, not alien paranormal occurrences, but a creepy mystery about a kidnapped FBI agent and underground experimental surgeries.

Since The X-Files inception in 1993, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have maintained a wonderful and rather unique, playful chemistry with their characters Mulder and Scully. The X-Files: I Want to Believe smoothly continues this successful professional and personal chemistry, and as this sequel begins, Mulder and Scully are ex-agents. Scully is a doctor in practice at a small hospital presently concerned with a young boy who is dying of a bone disease; Mulder is living like a recluse since he was released from the FBI. The agency begs their once star agents out of retirement to help them find a female agent who is missing in the field and may be held captive by some psycho.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe develops as a dark and creepy multi-layered tale as Mulder and Scully reluctantly return to help the agency. The FBI utilizes the services of a psychic ex-priest (Billy Connolly), a disgraced and troubled soul who is seeking a sort of strange redemption for his past pedophile convictions. He sees visions of the captive agent and leads agents on a search of the cold countryside to discover a severed human arm. Later, mysterious Russian criminals are somehow involved in the kidnapping of others and this is connected to some bizarre medical experiments.

Much of the plotting is intriguing, and director/writer Chris Carter never bores the viewer, but there doesn’t seem to be any big dramatic or emotional payoff to the story. The brooding winter atmosphere, shot in British Columbia and the solid performances of Duchovny and Anderson provide only an acceptable, but routine continuation of the cult series that used to really grip audiences in its heyday.