The Greatest Trick

Or, to give use its full title, The X: Files: I want to believe I can get the last two hours of my life back. To be fair, it’s not excruciatingly terrible, but it feels like a very average episode of the eponymous TV series, only drawn out to two hours instead of a tight forty-five minutes. It’s a curiously muted affair; slow, flatly directed and incoherent.

I’m not exactly sure why writer/director Chris Carter wanted to resurrect his hit TV series, since that itself went on at least three series too many. By the time it reached its baffling finale, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) had got so swamped in UFO’s, aliens, government conspiracies and other things far too bizarre and confusing to detail here, that even its most devoted fans were hard pressed to explain what was actually happening. Of course, this isn’t the first time The X-Files has hit the big screen. A previous movie was released in 1998, and whilst it was only understandable to those steeped in X-Files lore, I actually quite enjoyed it, if only for a very memorable sequence involving bees.

The good news is that I want to believe is a one-off story, designed to hark back to the earlier series where stand-alone plots were the norm. The bad news is that even as a stand-alone, it’s very confusing. As far as I could decipher, Mulder and Scully are asked to come out of retirement to provide their expertise on a confusing FBI serial killer case, where one of their own has been taken captive. The FBI have been relying on psychic former paedophile Catholic priest Father Joseph Crissman (a completely bonkers Billy Connolly) to uncover their clues, but are not sure if he is a fraud. This leads to an increasingly weird, but not nearly as disturbing as it should be horror tale that throws up questions of faith (more of that in a moment) as well as two-headed dogs. Oh, and there’s a subplot involving Scully trying to save a handicapped boy’s life through experimental stem-cell research that has something to do with the main plot. I can’t remember what exactly, and I don’t care. But then I don’t care about Mulder and Scully either, who are now entirely devoid of the sexual tension they had in the earlier TV series (which evaporated the moment they slept with one another). Occasionally, characters from the series reappear pointlessly (such as Mitch Pileggi’s Walter Skinner), whilst new characters such as the ludicrously glamorous FBI agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet), look embarrassingly out of place.

The only thing this film has in its favour is a potentially interesting spiritual undercurrent exploring whether or not God speaks to us, sometimes through the last person we would expect. Typically in the TV series, Mulder was sceptical about God, whereas Scully had at least a modicum of faith as a result of her Catholic background. Here however, the roles seem to be reversed with Mulder wanting to believe Crissman is getting messages, if not necessarily from God, then from some benevolent higher power. Scully on the other hand seems to be having a crisis of faith not dissimilar to Mel Gibson’s character in Signs. The way this crisis resolves itself is also similar to that film, in that she experiences God speaking to her in a way that anyone else could dismiss as co-incidence, but that she knows is not. Of course, many Christians (including myself) have had similar encounters, so will find themselves nodding in agreement. But only if they can sit through many interminably humourless sequences, not to mention violence, gore and – far more offensively – long stretches of sheer boredom. If you really want a thought provoking sci-fi film about the subtle ways God sometimes speaks to us, watch the infinitely superior Signs.

Therefore, in final analysis, despite the presence of a spiritually interesting subtext, there’s not much to write home about here. It’s admittedly gruesome Frankenstein-esque themes fails to generate the necessary sense of moral outrage, and as a thriller it fails to gather pace or excite the way the TV series occasionally could. In short, The X-Files: I want to believe is for completists only, and frankly I suspect that even they will feel short changed. I still want to believe I can get my two hours back.

Simon Dillon, August 2008.