Spoilers within
With what has to be one of dullest one sheets in recent movie memory, I wasn’t really expecting too much. The X Files-I Want To Believe moves along at a snail’s pace. The story is about a missing FBI Agent and the one Agent at the FBI who thinks former Agent Mulder can help to crack the case. There is an old man who has visions, played by Billy Connolly-who happens to be an ex-priest who buggered 37 altar boys-they seem to think this important as they mention it a lot.
These visions are why the FBI seeks out Doctor Scully, who spends her time these days helping poor sick children. She offers to pass the message on to Fox Mudler and there follows a Honey-I’m-Home scene with Scully finding Mulder in a room filled with newspaper clipping of recent X-Files type stories. Mulder has a beard and a scruffy look and there are a few minutes of old style X-Files patter about how this can’t be real from Scully and Mulder reciting some obscure dry facts that prove that it is real.
While our heroes are deciding what to do, we are given glimpses of women being abducted and locked away in animal shipping crates while creepy looking Nazi style doctors are busy doing– something. Clues are revealed, Visions are spoken, Mulder shaves and People die. There is a subplot involving one of Scully’s patients and whether or not she should try to save the boy or let him die in peace. The bad guys are not aliens, though to me it looked like the Black Oil dripping from Billy Connolly’s eyes in the trailer for The X Files-I Want To Believe. It was blood-an act of God not an Act of The Smoking Man’s Aliens.
It was fun to see Scully and Mulder again, Fox and Dana were never spoken that I recall. Even after living together for how many odd years they still call each other by their last names. When the bad guys are finally revealed, it is the kind of villain that would have felt at home on an episode of The X Files. Both oddly common seeming and totally impossible in every respect.
There was too much going on and not enough actually happening in The X Files I Want To Believe. Odd connections and no explantions, but then, that is the plot of most X Files episodes. The really good ones always left you wondering-what the hell happened out there? While this was not a really good one, it was an ok one. Any X Files is better than no X Files at all.
OK, it wasn’t great but I enjoyed it as much as an average or maybe slightly sub-par episode. And sure, I paid $10 but I still had fun since my expectations were so low after reading all the reviews.
I had a feeling this one might best be left to Netflix. What a bummer.