The press notes bill the carefully guarded plot of The X-Files: I Want to Believe as being in “the grand tradition” of the groundbreaking television series. In reality, it’s notably of a more recent tradition — of distributor 20th Century Fox’s increasing penchant for secretiveness with respect to almost all of its releases.

In a way, though, this curiously conservative, risk-averse strategy is understandable. For a stretch in the mid-1990s, The X-Files was the Lost of its era — a moody, popular TV show with a cool-factor off the charts and a sprawling, conspiracy-saturated mystery arc that rewarded multiple viewings and deep readings, and kept fans debating its many twists and turns. When stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson tired somewhat of duty, though, new cast members failed to provide much of a dramatic infusion, and the show’s grasp on the nation’s collective consciousness slowly loosened.



A big summer theatrical offering released in the middle of its run, to decent reviews and grosses, but it’s been a decade since that film, and five long years since the show went off the air. To that end, protecting the truth about I Want to Believe — that it’s leaner (20 minutes shorter than the ’98 film) and more straightforwardly rooted in character than its predecessor, and actually just like a self-contained episode of the series, and a fairly pedestrian one, at that — may be a safe bet by 20th Century Fox, if also, at the end of the day, a self-limiting one.

Set in West Virginia in the present day, the film finds both Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) out of the FBI. The latter has returned to medicine; she works as a doctor in a children’s hospital. Mulder, on the other hand, seems to be training hard in the unique triathlon of newspaper clipping, disaffected beard-growing and sardonic quipping. Together, they’re lured back into the fold by a case involving a missing FBI agent.

Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a scraggly-haired priest and convicted pedophile, claims to have visions of said agent, but when he leads the FBI to a severed arm buried in the snow — an arm that shares in common a blood type found at the crime scene — the plot thickens. Before you know it, you have a movie about gay Russian émigré organ harvesters. Yeah, seriously.

From almost the start, I Want to Believe feels like a flimsy excuse for a reunion. Psychic visions and communication, of course, figured prominently in the series, from early episodes like “Beyond the Sea” and “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” all throughout its small-screen run. And this storyline would be perfectly serviceable somewhere further down the line in a theoretical, modestly-budgeted series of purely investigatory tales — The Mulder & Scully Chronicles, if you will. But it doesn’t rise to the level of getting-the-band-back-together drama, nor does it match the sort of chaste, intellectual romance — wonderfully embodied by Duchovny and Anderson, who still evince a nice rapport — necessary in a tale that brings these two characters back to a profession that cost them so much, individually and collectively.

It’s all a bit frustrating, really. Clearly, the characters of Mulder and Scully have greater potential than this vehicle allows. It’s not that The X-Files: I Want to Believe is flat-out terrible; it’s absolutely not. It’s just the sort of movie one desperately keeps waiting to get better, and it never does. Hardcore fans will spin this fact, and embrace the movie; others, however, will bear witness to its false promise, and be left only wanting to believe. Ironic, then, that 20th Century Fox’s quiescent sales job may ultimately cost the film the sort of first-weekend box office splash that would have set up a franchise more firmly, and allowed director Chris Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz the chance to rectify these problems. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 104 minutes)