Written by Chris Carter & Frank Spotnitz

Directed by Chris Carter

X-Files: I Want to Believe

They resurrected Muldar and Scully for THIS?  I Want to Believe they had a better script, but lost it along the way and instead filmed this story about harvesting body parts, which while creepy and gross is not really an X-File at all.

 David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles as Mulder and Scully, now five years removed from working at the FBI. Mulder has become a recluse, living at a isolated farmhouse. Scully is working as a surgeon/physician/genral knowitall at a Catholic hospital. Agent Dakota Whitney (the ever alluring Amanda Peet!) calls on Mulder to help find a missing agent. Their only lead is a defrocked priest (he was a sex offender) named Father Joseph (Comedian Billy Connelly) who claims to get psychic visions about the crime. That's enough for Whitney to decide this is "X-File-ish" so she gets Scully to get Muldar to come in.

The search leads not to aliens, or to werewolves, or vampires or Bigfoot or Rosie O'Donnell or any other weird and creepy creature. Instead it all has to do with Russian scientists getting body parts from unwilling donors. It's gross, but not much of an "X-File".

Billy Connelly fails to create much interest in Father Joseph (after he starts bleeding from the eyes they kind of forget about him) and there's kind of a lack of interesting supervillian behind the Russian guys who have a connection to Father Joseph which allows him to have the visions. The actress who played Mulder's sister is all grown up now and walks past him when he arrives at FBI headquarters in a nice in joke. Amanda Peet is as smokin' red hot as ever and one wonders if there's some chemistry about to flare between her and Mulder (after all, Duchovney is a confessed sex addict). But no, Mulder plays nice and remains loyal to Scully.

A movie about Duchovney's sex addiction would have been more interesting (I would bet he bagged Peet offscreen if not onscreen!).

Gillian Anderson is fine as Scully, though once again she fails to use the opportunity to show off her famous "banana dance" on screen. Duchovney does not disappoint as Mulder.

The real failure comes from Chris Carter, the writer and director of this film. After doing so many good "stand-alone" episodes of the original "X-Files" series, he seems to have forgotten how to do one that has pace, action, tension, comedy and "X-Files" elements. Burned by the last "X-Files" movie that concentrated so much on aliens, Carter seems to have determined to go completely in the other direction and give us a FBI movie with bodies and stuff, but little that made the "X-Files" series so darn enjoyable (Mulder even seems to have forgotten that the FBI has been infiltrated and controlled by aliens!).

It's disappointing to fans of the series and had to be just boring to people who were not.

The truth is out there, but unfortunately its not good news for future "X-Files" movies. If they ever do one again, I'm sure it will be where it should have been all along, as a special Fox movie of the week. But "I Want to Believe" is not even good enough for that.