Spoiled Reviews apologizes for the typo at the top of the page. The full title for the latest chapter in the X-Files saga should read, X-Files: I Want to Believe It’s Still 1996. Way past their prime, Mulder and Scully reinvade the public consciousness with a new movie that feels as irrelevant and useless as abstinence-only sex-education. I should admit up front that I wasn’t a big fan of the original series. I liked the odd episode here and there, and totally knew what the Bare Naked Ladies were talking about when they hoped the Smoking Man was in this one. But I never geeked out on the series like some do.
That being said, I like the idea of this movie. It’s not a story wrap-up or a big, cameo-filled nostalgia trip. It’s just a single, contained storyline, like many of the show’s best episodes were. This time though, Mulder and Scully have quit the FBI; he’s privately obsessing about the paranormal and she’s a practicing medical doctor. The feds need help tracking down a missing agent and they’ve been getting tips from a man who claims to be receiving psychic messages about the kidnapping. He’s led them to a severed arm in the West Virginian winter wilderness that doesn’t belong to the victim.
Since Mulder and Scully are living together (I guess, the movie acted like I should know already) Agents Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and Mosely Drummer (X-to-the-Z Xzibit) come to her hospital to convince her to convince Mulder to come back for one last case. Apparently no one at the FBI is prepared to tackle a fairly straightforward abduction when someone claiming to be a psychic is involved. He agrees, only after glancing at a picture of his sister and remembering that she too was abducted, but by aliens.
This missing woman was not taken by ET, but by some creepy Russian dudes, who’ve also snatched up a young woman just as she was leaving her local natatorium. Mulder is stuck working the psychic, Billy Connelly as Father Joe, a former Catholic priest. Scully, one of those movie doctors who only has one patient who just happens to remind her of her dead son or some such thing (the movie’s light on details there to) can’t stand to be around Father Joe because he molested 39 children in the past. He sees these visions, murky and unhelpful as they may be, as his opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of God. If only he can save these girls. The FBI thinks Joe is in on the crimes as that would be the only way he could know the details and particulars he does.
Mulder doesn’t know what to think, at first, but starts slipping back into the darkness (he and Scully refuse to call their obsession with the paranormal anything but “the darkness”). Scully tries to save her one patient through some radical and painful stem cell treatments. The meanie of a priest who runs her hospital wants to let the kid die but she goes through with it anyway. She wants to believe that she can save the kid and Mulder wants to believe in Father Joe, and so does Scully really (although she won’t admit it).
There’s a lot of dry techno-babble that passes for dialogue, many tense moments, a few genuine surprises and far too much stupefying seriousness. So basically, it’s the X-Files. If you’re into that sort of thing you may like it, but I found the enterprise limp, humorless and unintriguing.
The only new character with any depth is Father Joe. Director and series creator Chris Carter attempts to keep the scope of Joe’s abilities ambiguous. Is he a psychic, a criminal, or just a crazy old coot? But as always, it’s fairly clear that Carter’s sensibilities lie on the supernatural side of the fence. Father Joe leads the FBI to a huge stash of human arms, none of which match the kidnap victims, but all of which test positive for a dog tranquilizer. Chris Carter isn’t interested in just the paranormal; he also digs the kinky.
Agents Whitney and Drummer are glorified props, though Whitney plays a slightly more interesting version of the stock dark suit. Of course, once the investigation closes in on a group of black-market organ runners, the head baddie pushes her down a newly constructed elevator shaft. If her fall wasn’t staged so hilariously it might have been mildly sad.
For the plot, Whitney’s death is just a minor setback in Mulder’s increasingly independent efforts to track down the truth (which just has to be out there, right?). He bumps into one of the organ runners at a pet supply store and follows him out to the farm where some pretty horror show stuff is going down. (We only see glimpses but they’re gruesome). After a minor setback, (the villain uses his snowplow to push the snoopy Mulder over a snowy cliff) Mulder arrives at the farm only to be attacked by a two-headed rottweiler and ultimately falls in the hands of these freaky, Russian, organ-stealing, Dr. Frankenstein wannabes. Apparently they’ve been trying to cure one of their ranks’ lung cancer by finding a whole new body to sew his head onto. The extremely poor logic of this plan not-withstanding, they’ve discovered a technique for grafting somebody’s body parts on to other people that mainstream medicine has completely ignored. For shame, Western medicine.
It’s up to Scully, with some help from her old boss Assistant Director Walter Skinner, to save the day. After reading some articles about these guys on the good old interwebs, she goes to Father Joe for some answers. Earlier in the film he had remarked to her that she shouldn’t give up and she wanted some clarification. She shouldn’t give up on her patient, on Mulder, who she is considering leaving, (I guess that confirms that they were living together) on her refusal to be enveloped by “the darkness”? Which one? He has a seizure, being old, terminally ill and what-not, but tells her to look up a specific passage in the bible first. Turns out, that passage matches up to a mailbox number which leads her, and AD Skinner (in a glorified cameo), to the mad scientists’ farmhouse.
They save Mulder from creepy, ax-wielding Russian dude and then rescue one of the abducted ladies (the swimmer, not the FBI agent) just before creepy, syringe-wielding Russian dude can graft creepy, lung-cancer infested Russian dude’s head onto her body. It’s a win for everyone except Scully (and the creepy Russian dudes), as per usual. She doesn’t know whether to believe or not. In God, the darkness, Mulder, anything really. She begins to doubt whether this painful, and risky, stem cell treatment is worth saving that patient of hers. She decides at the end to believe in herself and take the risk on the treatment and on Mulder as well. (A post credits sequence offers a small coda to the story, Mulder and Scully alone, together but still under the shadow of the government).
I’m probably making the movie out to be worse than it is, which is unfortunate because it’s not bad. It’s just not as good as some of the episodes I’ve seen and its scope is just as limited. The fact that Father Joe had molested one of the organ snatchers a long time ago (thus the psychic connection) was obvious but comes with some interesting ideas tied to it. But none are explored. Interesting thoughts throughout the film go uncultivated. It is very much an extended, or should I say padded, episode. Many scenes, (getting in and out of helicopters, walking down hallways, driving through the snowy landscape), are cleanly and thoughtfully shot but totally superfluous. Why not spend some time on the themes or the controversies? Chris Carter gives us some half-hearted entertainment, but never gives us a reason to believe in him or his moribund franchise.
-Brian Stitt
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