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Movie Review: X-Files: I Want to Believe, The

movies.nytimes.com - 24th Jul 2008

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David Duchovny: I wanted to believe. But with his big-screen blowup of his great and weird television series "The X-Files," Chris Carter has turned me into a reluctant skeptic. Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show's first feature-film incarnation, "The X-Files." Released in 1998 and directed by Rob Bowman, one of the show's regular frontmen, that earlier film was a seamless translation of the series's paranoid vibe and trademark geek cool. The series supersized nicely, filling the larger spatial dimensions by staying true to its conceptual parameters.

There's nothing stirring the air between Mulder and Scully, who, having left the bureau, come across as unmoored and unfocused, even when they're working on the outlandish criminal case that drags them back into the twilight zone. A similar lack of urgency characterizes the movie, which despite its yowling dogs, barking Russians, screaming women, swelling choral voices and moody cinematography by Bill Roe - which turns even dark blue a deeper shade of black - never finds a sustainable pulse.

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