Chris Carter cashes in.

Chris Carter is the on-again off-again genius behind the X-Files television series and subsequent movies.  I was a big fan of the series and was very disappointed with the way Carter wrote the series into a coma.  He went off, recharged his creative batteries a bit and was able to jolt the X-Files back to consciousness with the first movie which we rather enjoyed.  Apparently not satisfied with leaving the concept alive, if a bit crippled, he went away to, I assume, some remote mountain lair to plot the ultimate demise of the X-Files world.

After 10 long years, beard no doubt down to his knees, completely bedraggled, and apparently satisfied that he could kill it once and for all, he returned to create The X-Files: I Want to Believe.  The acting, for its part, is good.  Mulder and Scully are back and inhabiting the characters we grew to know, love, and ultimately feel sorry for (off, stuck in some idiot plot line).

So, from the folks who gave us endless mysterious alien stories, bizarre mystical concepts of divine and/or supernatural origins, psychokinesis and other bodily anomalies, what sort of plot do they give us to keep us clinging firmly to the edges of our seats this time?

Well, they give us a storyline that is so un-X-Files that, as you're piecing it together, your mind is churning furiously trying to guess what the big twist is going to be that makes this a plot worthy of Mulder's time.  When that big twist never comes and you're left with the plot they used, it's hugely disappointing.

Had they pared this down to 40 minutes and made it for television, it would've been more exciting, but still one of the more lackluster episodes of the series.  So, with a quick spoiler disclaimer, let's look at the plot.

Some Russians have set up shop out in the woods with the devious purpose of practicing the successful transplant of a person's head onto a donor body.  Sure, this is a good idea, if properly done, but this is more of a Morgan Freeman crime thriller than X-Files.  When you're Chris Carter and you try to make this idea seem more mysterious than it is by being vague and darkly dramatic, it fails.  Scully, as the ever-rational and scientific doctor type might have been interested in this, but certainly not Mulder.  It was set up to be a situation where we're supposed to believe Mulder is super interested and Scully couldn't care less.  Bass-ackwards if ya ask me. Had they reversed this and had Scully trying really hard to drag an uninterested Mulder along, it would've been more believable.

Did I mention the psychic pedophile Priest yet?

He's a very vague psychic who leads them to some body parts which the aforementioned Russians have been dumping.  The mystery connection here?  Well, turns out one of the Russian suspects used to be one of his alter boys.  Oooooo...spooky.  No, wait, I mean...Oooooo...lame. There really isn't any compelling reason to have a pedophile in the movie that I can think of, except the possibility that Chris Carter was brought up Catholic and had some traumatic experience.

What about some of the background noise in all of this.  Let's see, Mulder and Scully are officially shacked up/living together, but (if memory serves), they're not married.  Also, at some point they mentioned they had and lost a son, and it's addressed in the movie about as quickly as I did here.  Mulder was chased out and semi-wanted by the FBI apparently, but again, no additional detail was given for that.  Scully, the ever-rational and scientific doctor now spends her time working at a pretty strict and constraining Catholic hospital.  Of all the places she could work, why at a place likely to stifle science and rational thought?!

Overall, this movie was a depressing low-key stinker which is unlikely to be enjoyable to anybody, least of all long-time fans.