KEY POINTS:
Rating: * *
Verdict: The greatest TV couple of the 90s reunites in disappointing franchise revival
If you go as an X-phile, you're likely to be disappointed. If you go as an ex-X-phile - that is, someone who parted company with the once-great sci-fi show about the time of its ambitious last movie in 1998, or hung on until Duchovny's Mulder left a season later - you're likely to be a little confused. And if you spent the 90s abducted by an alien spacecraft and missed the whole thing, hey, welcome back. You won't believe what used to pass for entertainment round here ... gee, those were the days weren't they? In short, I Want to Believe does little to justify its belated existence. It does hark back to the era-defining series' heyday in more ways than bringing back the theme music. Apart from its aftermath setting with both Mulder and Scully both now ex-FBI agents, it plays like one of the early episodes which sidestepped the overarching alien-invasion government-conspiracy storylines for a self-contained paranormal crime story. Some of those episodes used to be great. This one - with its story about a defrocked priest (Connolly) playing a psychic detective in a case involving a kidnapped FBI agent which may involve evil Russians - might have been too. But while this achieves some nostalgic warmth when Duchovny and Anderson are sharing the screen, engaged in the same old debates about scientific proof versus supernatural hunch, there is severe lack of energy most everywhere else in the movie. It does have some humour, some of it intended - an early clue is a severed arm found buried in snow by that priest. Cue Mulder saying he's "going out on a limb". It also keeps things to a modest television scale. The last film ended up going all Close Encounters of the Third Kind in Antarctica. This one also has a thing for whiteout conditions, but extends to a couple of cars crashing off snowy Virginia roads and some unfriendly pets. Perhaps by keeping things scaled down, writer-director and series creator Chris Carter hopes that we might then concentrate on the movie's supposedly profound questions about faith signalled by its title and on the enduring Mulder-Scully relationship. Well, that is possible, especially as the case they're dragged back in to investigate isn't much of a distraction until the final reels where it all turns old-fashioned horror B-movie. Until then, much of the time is spent with Scully, now a doctor at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital battling the place's administrators over a terminally ill young patient whose only chance is an experimental stem cell procedure which, thankfully, she finds through a few minutes of googling. Meanwhile, Mulder is happy - despite his former employers having once charged him for treason - to help the FBI with Father Joe (Connolly) who hopes his visions of the escalating crimes is God's way of saying he's forgiven his sins involving 37 altar boys. Two agents played by Amanda Peet and Pimp My Ride's Xzibit - has any X Files actor had a better name for the job? - convince M&S to help out with the case. But they are soon largely surplus to requirements and nobody much misses them. And after this underwhelming reunion we won't much miss Mulder and Scully either.
Russell Baillie
Cast: David Duchovy, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly, Amanda Peet, Xzibit
Director: Chris Carter
Rating: M
Running time: 105 mins
Screening: Skycity, Hoyts, Berkeley
