X-Files Sequel: We Want to Believe, Too

Anderson is back as Scully. (Photo: Diyah Pera/Twentieth Century Fox)

The X-Files: I Want to Believe
104 minutes. Rated PG-13.
Opens at Metro and other theaters, Fri., July 25.
Reviewed by Scott Foundas

The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Since we last saw them, she’s become a doctor in a Catholic hospital, he a bearded recluse. (But rest assured, fans, they’re still each other’s main squeeze.) Considerably more meager in its ambitions than 1998’s epic-scaled, junkily entertaining Fight the Future, I Want to Believe sees our dynamic duo re-enlisted by their former employer to aid with . . . alien life forms? Some strange, inexplicable phenomenon? No, just an abducted agent and the convicted pedophile turned self-proclaimed psychic (Billy Connolly) who says he has visions of her whereabouts. But what series creator Chris Carter (who directed I Want to Believe) and longtime show-runner Frank Spotnitz (who co-wrote and produced) lack in plot-churning gusto, they try to make up for in ill-advised stabs at social relevancy, cramming in references to gay marriage, stem-cell research, and (of course) our reigning commander in chief that are more laughable than provocative. It remains a pleasure just to see Anderson, one of the best and most chronically underemployed American actresses, doing anything on-screen. But long before I Want to Believe reaches its anticlimax, you too may be having visions—of the exit sign.