Review: The X-Files: I Want To Believe (1/5)

The X-Files: I Want To Believe
(Chris Carter):
David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly.
Running time: 105 minutes


I have never seen a person zap a defibrillator into the chest of an exhumed 10-year-old corpse. Though I guess the limp response would look similar to this X-Files rehash. Chris Carter, who created the Emmy award-winning TV series, takes over from Rob Bowman to direct, but he has no energy, no screen electricity, nor any ideas. This should have been left alone in the basement to gather dust with all those unsolved case files. David Duchovny’s Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Scully are now a retired couple: he’s grown a beard, is in hiding from the FBI and prowls around the house looking at old photos during the day. Meanwhile, Scully goes to work as a consultant-cum-surgeon-cum-cutting-edge scientist at an old-school faith-run hospital. This is the pretext for some flimsy debate involving faith versus skepticism, followed by some thoroughly unjustified and unsettlingly weird, suggestive nastiness in the hospital chief (Adam Godley), who happens to be a priest. Is he eyeing up the young sick child because he is a paedophile or just because he wants to close his case? We’ll never know. Perhaps Carter has something to get off his chest. Billy Connolly turns up as Father Joseph, a paedophile priest turned psychic who divines clues about a woman FBI agent who goes missing in the snow. When he goes into a trance, his eyes start to drip stigmatic blood. I know the feeling. Mulder is enticed out of hiding to investigate. Are Father Joseph’s psychic powers real or fake? The trail leads to a set of baddies that would send decent Republican folk into foaming apoplexy. They are, wait for it, a pair of married, gay Russian men. Holy moly! Though we are never shown, it should be presumed they have a secret cabinet out back full of Nazi memorabilia and a kiddy dungeon downstairs. Their schtick is in illegal transplants and they work in an operating theatre at night in the middle of nowhere where the lights are on dimmer. Can they not afford the electricity? The procedural that follows drains the blood. Gone is the series’ former sci-fi charm to cash in on Hollywood’s obsession with torture porn. The X-Files has turned sadistic. I presume this is because its former audience is now at home scrimping for mortgages. Can it find a teenage audience groomed on violent horror? At no point does it stop being a stretched TV episode and become a feature film. Carter builds into events an anaemic subplot about the relationship tension between Mulder and Scully. They talk lethargically at one another, in the way couples who lost the heat long ago learn to do. The best kind of advice for that kind of relationship is to get out of it as soon as you can. I could say the same about this artless junk.