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Friday 9 January 2009

Not for terrestrials

The X-Files: I Want to Believe
15, Nationwide

It’s one, big, juicy cliché, and even begins, as countless thrillers do, when Mulder is summoned out of retirement — you’re the only man for the job! — by the FBI because a female agent is among women being kidnapped in a wintry patch of rural West Virginia, where body parts are turning up under the snow. The divining rod is Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a visionary psychic who is also a former priest, defrocked for abusing altar boys. Quite what the paedophilia — The Paedo-Files? — has to do with anything, I couldn’t say, just as there is no accounting for so much of what happens. The film’s ambition may well be to ‘stand alone’ but, alas, it doesn’t even stand up.

Now, where were we, as if we care, which I’m not sure we do, but come on. It was my 104 minutes and I’ve got to get something out of it. OK, Mulder is, of course, joined by Scully, who now works as a hospital surgeon, which is cool, but who is also the dreariest, most humourless woman ever, which is not so cool. As for the famed ‘sexual chemistry’ — nope, nothing, not a squeak. He’s sullen; she’s a pain; and Duchovny and Anderson act with such little energy it is as if they can’t be bothered. They’re even in bed together at one point — is that a big thing?; I don’t know — and it’s as if they can’t be bothered. If you are after ‘chemistry’, you’d be better off in Boots.

Although the first half of the film keeps it together to a certain extent — although not to a great extent — the latter half spins off into a great shambles of awfulness and implausibility. One of the baddies is a human organ transporter who is stealing the organs, and has been doing so for a considerable time. Well done to the FBI for finally figuring this out, but hang on: didn’t any of the hospitals due to receive the organs alert anybody that they hadn’t turned up? Wasn’t the patient, stretched out and waiting for his or her new heart, a little annoyed? The baddies, by the way, are all Russians with bad teeth. Should I ever find myself in LA, I am determined to stand outside all the major studios with a loudhailer, shouting, ‘The Cold War is over! No, seriously, it is!’ And, depending on how I am feeling, I might then add, ‘And they do have dentistry in Russia, you know!’

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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