‘X-Files 2′ Harms David’s Psyche
The closely guarded secrets have been revealed...
Fox Mulder has a beard! There I’ve wanted to print that for six months now. Not that the beard is anything important, and of course he has it only for the movie’s first act. It’s just a descriptive detail I noticed from my set visit last February and I only bring it up here because the producers of The X-Files: I Want to Believe thought such a minor detail was of national security importance. Did Mulder’s beard house a nuclear missile silo? Or perhaps a barn of magical unicorns or something? Every email we received allowing us to dole out info from the set visit reminded everyone NOT TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT MULDER’S BEARD! Or really anything much else for that matter; in fact, the last piece I wrote for the movie was redacted by the filmmakers due to the very light spoilers I picked up from a scene we watched them shoot.
Maybe director Chris Carter and his co-writer/exec-producer Frank Spotnitz should have worried less about Mulder’s beard (fake by the way) or the revelation of plot details (a marketing campaign that obviously backfired) and focused more on creating a film that didn’t suck so hard.
The movie opens sixyears since the show ended. Mulder (David Duchovny), a fugitive from the F.B.I., which is not that interested in finding him, lives in country seclusion outside of the Washington D.C. area. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a surgeon at a Catholic hospital, which involves an absolutely dull (and almost pointless) subplot where she tries to save a child patient from a rare disease.
An F.B.I. agent goes missing, and the next thing you know the Feds think Mulder and Scully can help since the investigation involves a pedophile priest (Billy Connelly delivering the one performance here worthy of recognition) who may be psychic. The rest of the plot involves limbs found in the snow, women abductions, an inept Russian baddie who loves hitting cars with his pick-up truck, organ donations, and such a lame scheme from the villains (and honestly the film’s villains are superficial sketches at best) it’s straight out of a Z-grade movie “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ would ridicule. No seriously, I swear I’ve seen a movie on “MST3K” that has an identical story idea.
Maybe there’s a reason why the filmmakers kept everything so close to the vest. There’s nothing interesting here to reveal. It’s completely hollow. Notice how Fox has had to jazz up the commercials by adding a cheesy special-effect where a character morphs into a human flash-light. Yeah, obviously not in the movie. That’s because the movie only has two money-shots (a gross overstatement if there ever was one), someone falling down an elevator shaft and Mulder’s car getting shoveled by a snow truck plow. How exciting.
The X-Files: Lameass Subtitle feels like a rejected 90 minute television episode, a very cheap one at that. It’s flat, lifeless. It looks sort of pretty with the winter landscapes, yet Carter doesn’t squeeze one moment of suspense from the naturally spooky setting. He doesn’t dig out one moment of suspense or intensity from anything in the film. It’s not scary. It’s incredibly boring and clunky. And the climax… Jesus God. I swear I just thought “the climax” was another beat in the movie. Underwhelming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is one dead stick of a thriller, and an incredibly stupid one at that (don’t get me started on how Scully saves the day or how at one moment the camera pans to a pic of George W. Bush and the score cues the famous theme music).
I hated this movie and I’m sad to say that.
I dug “The X-Files” when I it was in its prime. I’ve been waiting for a non-alien X-Files movie for sometime. If the filmmakers had gone the way of some of the great quirky episodes from the series, they could have created something that felt really fresh. But no. We’re stuck with a pathetic excuse for an episode, much less a film, by filmmakers more concerned with facial hair and spoilers than anything else. Ha and you thought the final few seasons of the series were a miserable way to go out. Good job guys! You just officially killed the X-Files franchise.
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