I normally don’t read reviews for movies until after I’ve seen them, but I was intrigued by the high number of negative early reviews that came out for The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The basic summary of the negative reviews was that this movie is more on par with an episode of the show, and just not big enough to be a movie. I happen to agree. Even if this had been an episode of the show, it would have been a boring one. Double the length and add some tacky sentimental crap, and you end up with this movie. I’m predicting it to be a major box office bomb.

The movie starts out with an FBI agent being attacked and kidnapped at her home, intermixed with scenes of a pedophile psychic priest (Billy Connolly) helping a large team of agents try to find the body. Instead, they find a human arm belonging to an unidentified man. Because of the priest’s supposed psychic powers that can’t otherwise be explained, the FBI calls in Mulder (David Duchovny) to help with the investigation and his partner Scully (Gillian Anderson) assists with the case. When another person goes missing, they slowly work to string the clues together and figure out what is going on.

Just about everything that made The X-Files such a good show was left out of this movie. There’s hardly any humor and barely anything at all supernatural. Instead, there’s a bunch of overdone drama, too much philosophy, and an incredibly weak conclusion. When you see a movie on the big screen, especially one like this, there are certain expectations. None of those were met. This really is just like an extended episode of the show, and not a single thing about it exceeded anything I’d ever seen on the show. It takes a good half hour before anything remotely interesting happens, and it never picks up after that.

I found this movie to be incredibly boring and too predictable. It reveals early on what is actually happening to the people being kidnapped, then it slowly plays out as Mulder and Scully figure it out on their own. There are a couple of creepy scenes, but nothing at all scary. When the few seconds of actual good stuff finally happen, they just don’t have the impact because the rest of the package is such a bore. On top of all that, and at this point I am just nitpicking, why release a movie in July that shows a bunch of people tromping around in snow the whole time?

My wife is a huge fan of the show, and she wanted to like this movie so much that she went home depressed about how bad it was. People in the theater were yawning loudly and squirming in their seats, and one guy even got up and walked out about thirty minutes before it ended, never to return. In the end, I think The X-Files: I Want to Believe is going to be such a bomb that there won’t be any more of these movies, and that’s a shame. After six years, is this really the best they could come up with?


Recommended: No