MovieTime

Review

by Julie Rigg

This is the second X Files movie. Six years since the long-running series ended, creator Chris Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz have brought Mulder and Scully out of retirement because an FBI agent has gone missing,(again?) and a retired priest has been having visions of her!

Turns out the priest, played by Billy Connolly, is a convicted paedophile. Indeed he lives in a whole colony of them (now there's a though). But he does have these visions, and even stigmata. So this is a very trendy film.

To make it even trendier, a good dob of stem cell therapy is thrown in, and some frontier transplant work. The villains are Russian (thank God for the Russian mafia, it's keeping American sceenwriters in business).

But a couple of things keep slowing down the film. One of them is the arguments between Mulder and Scully, they are so cliched, they don't advance the story, just keep interrupting it with near metronomic precision. I felt like screaming at the screen: 'Oh just get on with it, wont you!'

The other is a side story about Scully as a doctor: now practising frontline experimental surgery. But would you trust a surgeon who has to start by looking up the procedure on Google?

At that stage I stopped wanting to believe. A pity, because Mulder is sexier than ever. But this is not up to the best of the original series.

Director: Chris Carter
Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, Alvin Xzibit Joiner, Adam Godley, Callum Keith Rennie
Producer: Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz
Script: Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz
Cinematographer: Bill Roe
Editor: Richard Harris
Running time: 104
Australian distributor: 20th Century Fox
Language: English
Classification: M