|
|
Film
|
|
The 20th Century Fox Files
Another weekend, another News Corp. mainstream offering fastidiously kept on the down low. But in this case, it might actually backfire.
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 1:45 PM
By Brent Simon
|
|
|
20th Century Fox
Photo
|
|
West Virginifornication
|
|
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 – that 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.
|
|
20th Century Fox
Photo
|
|
Her Newsweek interview was way more entertaining
|
|
|
A big summer theatrical offering was released in the middle of its TV 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 may be a safe bet by 20th Century Fox, if also, at the end of the day, a self-limiting one. Part DeuX is both leaner (20 minutes shorter than the '98 film) and more straightforwardly rooted in character than its predecessor. It’s just like a self-contained episode of the series, though a fairly pedestrian one at that.
From almost the start, I Want to Believe feels like a flimsy excuse for a reunion. 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.
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.
|
|
20th Century Fox
Photo
|
|
Wayward Scot Billy Connelly
|
|
|
But the new film doesn't rise to the level of getting-the-band-back-together drama, nor does it match the sort of chaste, intellectual romance necessary in a tale that brings these two characters back to a profession that cost them so much, individually and collectively.
It isn't merely that I Want to Believe is on a couple levels miscast, though surely that doesn't help. As the FBI agent who summons Mulder back to the fold, Amanda Peet seems disengaged, never registering much of an impression, while rapper-turned-actor Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner is terrible as her partner. No, the chief problem is that everything here feels constricted and of small stakes, even though lives are ostensibly hanging in the balance.
For a movie built on characters, the film is not a particularly subtle work in any regard. Subtext is repeatedly articulated throughout, and the villain is required to act in a deeply incongruous manner. Narrative contrivances that might skate by in a 46-minute episode, broken up by commercials, here stick out like a sore thumb, be it laughably vague insights by the pivotal character of Father Joe (Billy Connelly) or wild leaps of logic that help maneuver Scully into place for the finale.
Though The X-Files: I Want to Believe is not flat-out terrible, one keeps waiting for it to get better. Hardcore fans will spin this fact, and embrace the movie; others, however, will bear witness to its false promise, and be left 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 Carter the chance to rectify these problems with a trilogy-ending capper.
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|