Not for terrestrials
Deborah Ross
The X-Files: I Want to Believe 15, Nationwide
OK, straight to the point, because we are busy people, right? And when we are not busy we are pretending to be busy, right? So, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, worth your time? No. As it is, it’s 104 minutes that I won’t be getting back. Just think: 104 minutes. I could have done a lot of pretending to be busy in that time. I could have done a lot of ‘Not now! I’ve got a deadline!’ while making typing noises with one hand and leafing though the Boden catalogue with the other. Do we like Boden? I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’m just not ‘sassy’ enough.
Anyway, I should, I suppose, confess that I never particularly cared for the popular TV series on which the movie is based. In fact, the nine seasons of it pretty much passed me by, probably because it was always billed as ‘sci-fi’ and I only have to get a sniff of sci-fi, and I’m off. I am very terrestrial in this way. Still, none of this should matter. According to Chris Carter, the series creator who also wrote, directed and produced this, an understanding of the series’ mythology is not a prerequisite. ‘This is a real stand-alone movie,’ he says in the press notes. ‘If the show hadn’t existed, this is a story that would have found its way to the big screen.’ Well, if he wants to believe that, let him believe it. Do I have time to argue? Do I even have the ‘sass’? It’s rubbish, though.
OK, I know the basics. The X-Files is about two FBI agents, Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned to investigate unsolved cases within the Bureau; cases that often involve the paranormal, the supernatural and the inexplicable. Perhaps the TV series was as good and entertaining as it was popular, but this is so terrible it’s not even quite fun (like Mamma Mia, say); it’s just terrible. It’s muddled, confusing, contrived, suspense-free, utterly pointless and, for the most part, boring as hell. My dears, it’s The Zzz-Files, fit only for Zzz-ing, which you can do in spades. You won’t miss anything, I promise.
It’s one, big, juicy cliché, and even begins, as countless thrillers do, when Mulder is summoned out of retirement — you’re the only man for the job! — by the FBI because a female agent is among women being kidnapped in a wintry patch of rural West Virginia, where body parts are turning up under the snow. The divining rod is Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a visionary psychic who is also a former priest, defrocked for abusing altar boys. Quite what the paedophilia — The Paedo-Files? — has to do with anything, I couldn’t say, just as there is no accounting for so much of what happens. The film’s ambition may well be to ‘stand alone’ but, alas, it doesn’t even stand up.
Now, where were we, as if we care, which I’m not sure we do, but come on. It was my 104 minutes and I’ve got to get something out of it. OK, Mulder is, of course, joined by Scully, who now works as a hospital surgeon, which is cool, but who is also the dreariest, most humourless woman ever, which is not so cool. As for the famed ‘sexual chemistry’ — nope, nothing, not a squeak. He’s sullen; she’s a pain; and Duchovny and Anderson act with such little energy it is as if they can’t be bothered. They’re even in bed together at one point — is that a big thing?; I don’t know — and it’s as if they can’t be bothered. If you are after ‘chemistry’, you’d be better off in Boots.
Although the first half of the film keeps it together to a certain extent — although not to a great extent — the latter half spins off into a great shambles of awfulness and implausibility. One of the baddies is a human organ transporter who is stealing the organs, and has been doing so for a considerable time. Well done to the FBI for finally figuring this out, but hang on: didn’t any of the hospitals due to receive the organs alert anybody that they hadn’t turned up? Wasn’t the patient, stretched out and waiting for his or her new heart, a little annoyed? The baddies, by the way, are all Russians with bad teeth. Should I ever find myself in LA, I am determined to stand outside all the major studios with a loudhailer, shouting, ‘The Cold War is over! No, seriously, it is!’ And, depending on how I am feeling, I might then add, ‘And they do have dentistry in Russia, you know!’ There are all sorts of things going on in this film to do with God, science and that which we don’t understand, but none of it is even vaguely coherent. At 104 minutes, it may even be 104 minutes too long. It wants us to believe. I didn’t; you won’t. Is the truth ‘out there’? No, because you just heard it now.
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