So, with the passing of all the fin de siècle angst that in to no small degree provided the inspiration for Chris Carter’s (at times) seminal sci-fi/horror show The X-Files, are we left with very much to maintain the mood ten years on from the first film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) and six years after the end of the TV series?

I’m afraid not. Despite the excessive gushing in the critics’ press pack and elsewhere about ‘top secrecy‘ and the new film being in the tradition of the series’ very best stand-alone episodes (ie, those that weren’t about alien conspiracy theory) , I Want to Believe emerges as very little more than a desultory, tacked on mess.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have sought pastures new with the passing of time – Scully has really got her skates on since leaving the FBI and is once again a caring, brilliant (naturally) physician/surgeon. Mulder, on the other hand, has seen his ten years of spooky investigations disowned and disgraced by the Feds. What’s more (probably much more, for X-Files geeks still marking the passage of their own lives via the romantic associations of fictional FBI investigators), the pair are now co-habiting. Oo-er, missus…

Of course, the call back to arms has to come, and come it does, with the kidnapping of FBI agent Monica Bannan (Xantha Radley) and the intervention of Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly, amazingly enough) who is claiming to be having visions both of the perpetrators and the victim. His ‘second sight’ leads investigators to a severed arm in a Vancouver ice field – but it’s a man's limb. The plot, naturally, thickens…is Father Jo for real or, given his sordid past involving sexual favours taken from choir boys, should he be considered a suspect? Scully convinces Mulder to take the case – but he refuses to work alone…

Writer-director Chris Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz really could have done so much more with their decision to break away from little green men – Connolly’s performance as the tormented man of God, and the questions of faith that the mystery throws up for both our heroes, give the impression that there could have been far greater effort made on the back story – the final horror/explanation/dénouement is nothing short of silly and the chilly chemistry that Duchovny and Anderson created with their earlier performances has all but departed, leaving us with characterizations that add nothing to the mythos apart from mush. You just don’t buy them as being in love, and that undermines much of their motivation.

Worst of all, it simply isn’t scary. The truth may still be out there but, after this, one isn’t sure who’s going to care.
104 mins.

James Drew

Released 30 July across Europe

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(expatica 2008)