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 This nearly decade after the first installment of X-Files: Fight The Future (1999) is a worthy film for the genre. You need not be a fan of the original TV Series or even knowledgeable about it, but it surely helps. In this X-Flick we are reunited with FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who have since both retired from the FBI, but whose services are sought in one form or another, to help solve a perplexing crime. For fans of the series, it is hard not to enjoy both Duchovny and Anderson reprising their famous roles.
As the film opens, we get a priest leading a team of FBI agents across a field of ice somewhere in the Virginia mountains. The priest, Father Joseph (Joe) Fitzgerald Crissman, is a convicted pedophile but the FBI is convinced of his immense psychic abilities. After all, he leads the FBI team directly to the spot where a severed arm is buried in the ice. The priest is receiving visions of these gruesome crimes, which he then passes on to the FBI. The problem is that the FBI has not had the expertise to deal with this sort of defrocked psychic priest since the days of Agent Fox Mulder was running around the FBI headquarters convincing all of paranormal activities, alien abductions, big foot and more. So they get Scully, now a surgeon, to go get Mulder, now a fugitive I suppose. They forgive him of his transgressions against the Bureau and put him back to work. In this film, we find Mulder a man "who wants to believe" but does not necessarily "believe." The truth is worth noting because in previous incarnations of the X-Files, one might be convinced it was Agent Mulder who did indeed believe in all of this and he was blinded by his beliefs. So, Mulder, through his years as a FBI pariah, has seemed to have made an effort to dumb down his believability. If you recall, his whole life has been one effort to explain how his sister was abducted by an alien. In this film, he does collect clipped news articles of the paranormal, but he also likes to see how many pencils he can get stuck in the ceiling of his home office. A side plot involves Dana Scully, who is no longer with the FBI. She is working at Lady of our Sorrows, a Catholic hospital. There she is a surgeon and is faced with a tough choice to let a child named Christian die or undergo an experimental stem cell transplant procedure to cure his terminal brain disease. The priest of the hospital believes the boy should be allowed to spend his remaining days in peace rather than undergo a painful surgery. She is torn about what to do. Scully is abhorred at the thought of the young boy dying. She reluctantly turns to the pedophile priest regarding his visions and a cryptic utterance he made to her while he was getting out of a crashed car in an effort to summon more visions. He said "Don't give up." He said it directly to her. Was it about the current crime or was it more about Scully's ordeal with the boy at the hospital? If so, how did he know about it. Scully, the perpetual skeptic, had reason to pause. And so the chase is on to find the source of the priest's visions. Turns it out it involves some modern Frankenstein doctors who are hacking off arms and heads and doing all sorts of mismatched surgical procedures on abducted patients (the future of health care in America if you ask me). The doctors and their accomplishes are Russians for reasons that seem wholly peripheral to the plot. Me personally, I don't mind when the bad guys are from a certain politically correct genre of bad guys with recommendations from central casting but I much prefer when those bad guys have a good reason for being from that part of central casting other than well Russians make good bad guys. Yes, they did explain these doctors were doing dog experiments in Russia and so maybe that is the logical tie in. But, I don't think you needed the Russians in this film. These could have been home grown weirdos. However, even nowadays in these United States, you have to be mindful of where you claim these home grown weirdos come from. Some states, West Virginia for one, is very mindful of stereotypes depicting all of its residents as either from the Hatfield or McCoy Clan. You get the picture. So, maybe, they just said, these weirdo doctors are Russian. They don't like us so who will complain. Maybe I am making too much out of that point. For the butter on my popcorn, Russians are still great movie villains. There is a connection between the priest and his visions. It turns out he is receiving them, or at least we can infer such, becuase they are originating from an altar boy he once molested and who is married to another man. Well, in deference to the Russians as the bad guys, I suppose they did draw the ire of Catholicism and the Gay rights community with this plot thread. What is this connection? The priest seems to see through the eyes of the killer and they seem to suffer ailments at the same time. So this priest not only molested the killer in his childhood, he became meshed with his soul? I should say Amanda Peet plays a serviceable role in this film as Agent Dakota Manning, who gets pushed off a construction site. Billy Connolly did well as the pedophile priest with visions. Hard to say that Duchovny was not as good as he always is in his understated portrayal of Mulder and there is no difference here. Gillian Anderson was excellent and were it not for the pop, sometimes campy, plot line of the film, she is deserving of a Best Supporting Actress nod in my X-Files. Where the film gets the highest marks is the style, mood and tone. I liked how it was perpetually dark and snowy. Additionally, I enjoyed the quick views from inside the box, where one abducted girl was able to make out the Russian weirdos doing bizarre medical experiments. However, there could have been something more involving foot chases and getting whacked with logs. I don't fault it for going bare bones on the special effects, because I think the realism of not having all that fake stuff, ratchets up the mood and suspense. A two-headed dog aside, this movie felt real. Still, I would have liked a more creative approach to action even with out heavy CGI. Directed by Chris Carter, and written by Carter and Frank Spotnitz, X-Files: I Want To Believe is the second feature film based on Carter's TV series The X-Files, following the 1998 film. My inner Mulder wants to believe this movie is a King, but, alas, my inner Scully says its a Queen.
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