X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE  * * *
Cert 15 104 mins
A decade since the first film and six years and much legal wrangling on from the end of the TV series, Chris Carter finally brings Mulder and Scully back to the screen. However, stating that it’s a stand alone with no connection to the X-Files canon, he seems to have done so with a spare thriller script he had knocking around, simply tweaking it to insert the characters and some fuzzy arguments about faith and scepticism.

When an FBI agent goes missing, the Bureau (represented by S&M clones Xibit and Amanda Peet) approaches Scully (Gillian Anderson) and asks her to make contact with Mulder (David Duchovny) because a paedophile former priest, Father Joseph (a rather good Billy Connolly) claims to have had a vision that’s led them to a severed arm in a frozen lake.

One of the screenplays many foggy points, it’s never quite made clear whether the pair are now living together (given the absence of sexual tension and chemistry, you’d assume so) but, dismissing the last six years of him being wanted for treason with the line ‘ the FBI have forgiven you’, she duly convinces the now dodgily bearded Mulder to get involved.

No longer with the FBI, Scully’s returned to being a doctor and is involved in a subplot about treating a young lad dying from a rare brain condition. This allows the screenplay to make passing allusion to the baby the pair once had, vaguely evokes memories of Scully’s miracle cure and, more importantly eventually proves to have a thematic connection to the main narrative which, for those prepared to suspend medical disbelief, turns out to be some sort of cross between The Island of Dr Moreau and Re-animator involving creepy but seriously inept Russians, two headed dogs and the things you do for love.

Long-standing fans will be disappointed at the lack of any extraterrestrial guff, but it’s hard to see anyone getting too involved to believe in either the plodding, tenuous and seriously contrived plot or the repetitive dithering about divine/supernatural involvement by way of Connolly’s self-loathing penitent.

Largely shot against snowy backwoods settings, it looks atmospheric though and Carter’s still adept at investing fleeting shadows with a sense of real threat while Duchovny gets to toss off some dark witticisms and Anderson does her emotional conflict bit. There’s also an amusing use of the signature theme notes over a photo of George Bush. But, really, it’s just not out there enough.

THE LOVE GURU - no stars
Cert 12A 86 mins
This year’s Norbit, at one point Mike Myers is sloshed in the face with a mop soaked in urine. Sitting through this atrocity is a similar experience.

Deservedly bombing in America, it has Myers as Pitka, an American orphan raised in an ashram to become a celebrity self-help author and the world’ No 2 Guru behind childhood chum Deepak Chopra.

He sees his chance to take the top spot and land that valuable Oprah slot when Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba looking like a startled rabbit), owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, asks him to help reconcile star player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) with his estranged wife (Meagan Good).

Seems she got fed up him not standing up to his mom and has taken up with even more well endowed rival Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake, amazingly the best thing here), since when his game’s gone to pot. Unless Pitka can patch up the marriage, the team won’t win the championships.

So much for plot. What takes up the rest of the mercifully short running time is a slurry of Myers’ trademark sub Benny Hill double entendres and sexual sight gags, toilet humour that five year olds might find a bit tiresome and much politically incorrect ‘hilarity’ involving sizeist gags about Verne Troyer’s Coach Cherkov.

If none of this has you rolling in the aisles, then there’s always the acronym titles of Pitka’s books, Be Loving & Open With My Emotions for example, or the sidesplitting names of characters like Pitka’s blind mentor, Tugginmypudha.

You can probably draw your own quality conclusions from the fact that he’s played by Ben Kingsley, a man whose never met a pay cheque he didn’t like, while Oprah declined to even let her voice be featured. Sadly the same can’t be said for Morgan Freeman.

Directed in a panic by Marco Schnabel who simply lets Myers’ mugging run riot as the film throws in copulating elephants, Bollywood dances and a running gag cameo by Law and Order’s Mariska Hargitay in a desperate hope that something will stick.

Something does, but you wouldn’t want to smell it.

MAN ON WIRE  * * *
Cert 12A 94 mins
In 1968, Philippe Petit, a 17-year-old authority-flouting French street entertainer, was flicking through a magazine in his dentist’s waiting room when he came across an artist’s impression of the yet unbuilt World Trade Centre. He drew a pencil line between the two, tore out the page and left the dentist’s with a dream.

Six and a half years later, with Notre Dame and Sydney Harbour Bridge having served as rehearsals, on Aug 7 that pencil line became a thin steel cable stretching between the two towers as, 1350 feet above the ground and without either harness or safety net, for 45 minutes Petit not only walked on it, but juggled, balanced on one leg, knelt down and even lay on his back on it before finally being arrested for criminal trespass. The details of complaint report simply lists ‘man on wire’.

Why did he do it? Because he could.

Dubbed ‘the artistic crime of the century’ and elbowing Nixon’s impending resignation off the front pages, Petit’s story (adapted from his book To Reach The Clouds) marks Brit director James Marsh’s return to documentary after his undervalued narrative debut, The King.

Given Petit’s ego and sense of showmanship, it comes as no surprise that there was plenty of archive footage from the eight months of planning carried out by him and his co-conspirators, among them girlfriend Annie Allix, Jean-Francois Heckel, best friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, Australian Mark Lewis, and inside man Barry Greenhouse who worked in the South tower and helped smuggle in the equipment.

To these illuminating home movies, Marsh adds interviews with those involved and, playing like a heist thriller, a reconstruction of the team casing the building and the tense hours hiding near the roof before they carried out the rigging and the walk.

It’s a fascinating film about a once in a lifetime story, a celebration of passion and inspired madness. But, documenting post-walk events as Petit (discharged on condition he entertained some kids) became a feted celebrity, it’s also a poignant observation on how intense shared experience can forge relationships but also dissolve them in the following calm. And, seven years on from 9/11, it’s also an uplifting magical memory of a more innocent time.

CASS  * * *
Cert 18 108 mins
If you’ve not already had your fill of recent football hooligan related stories with Football Factory, Green Street, and Rise of the Footsoldier, Jon Baird’s biopic of Carol ‘Cass’ Pennant, arguably the first celebrity thug, is worth a look.

Based on Pennant’s own books (after renouncing violence he went on to become one of the country’s top black authors) it opens in 1993 with him being gunned down outside a London nightclub before flashing back to chart his rise to infamy.

An orphaned Jamaican baby adopted by a loving elderly East End white couple (an excellent Linda Bassett and Peter Wight), subjected to racist bullying as a lad Cass found violence brought power (in Wolverhampton, as it happens) and the subsequent respect and acceptance he needed among West Ham’s terrace thugs, going on to become the 6’5” and built like an ox leader of the notorious Inter City Firm, determined to grab the front pages.

Eventually arrested after he and his mates stormed a Newcastle Working Men’s club, Cass (Nonso Anozie) spent two years in the Scrubs, emerging determined to write a book about football’s darker side and meeting and eventually marrying working class white girl Elaine (Nathalie Press, terrible).

Although aware that, in the Thatcher crackdown on football hooliganism, he’s now a marked man, when childhood ICF buddy Prentice is slashed by an Arsenal supporter, Cass isn’t one to let it lie. But, faced with having to choose between his old life and Elaine, he hooks up with fellow ex-con Ray (Tamar Hassan), running the bouncers for his clubs. But the past has a nasty way of catching up.

Looking decidedly low budget with a dearth of extras and some not entirely convincing fights, it also comes up short on the editing and pace, frequently plodding and hesitant with a redemptive third act that, punctuated by clunky soapbox messages, seems to take forever.

At its best in the tender, at times emotionally awkward scenes between Cass and his adoptive parents, dialogue and support turns are erratic and while Anonzie delivers a solid performance of rage looking for expression the non-objective screenplay never persuades you Cass’s decision to go straight was based on moral awakening rather than practical considerations. Still, at least Danny Dyer’s not in it.

SPACE CHIMPS  * * *
Cert U 89 mins
Feeling himself unable to live up to the legacy of his grandfather, the first chimp in space, Ham III (Andy Samberg) has instead become a clowning simian cannonball. However, when an unmanned space probe disappears into a wormhole and winds up an alien planet, he’s press-ganged by an ambitious senator (Stanley Tucci) as the PR celebrity factor in a three chimp mission to follow it.

Joining uptight and somewhat dim commander Titan (Patrick Warburton) and romantic interest co-pilot Luna (Cheryl Hines), Ham’s an entirely reluctant astronaut but, when they get to Malgor (a sort of colourful Barney-land designed by Dali) and discover that the probe has enabled Zartog (Jeff Daniels) to go from mere grouch to planetary tyrant, he will, inevitably discover his inner hero.

NASA buffs may remember that a chimp called Ham (named for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center to be precise) was used on a test run for manned space exploration, but it’s unlikely too many boffins over the age of eight are going to be among the audience for this affable but unambitious animation.

Nowhere near the Pixar league, but well up the standard of, say an Ice Age or Jimmy Neutron (complete with rubbery looking characters), there’s plenty of slapstick knockabout for the kids and a gag about the SuperEgo and the Id for any stray adult.

Even at this short running time, it still feels padded (did it really need a dance scene involving an alien jelly bean creature when the chimps were racing to get home?) and repetitive. But with witty touches that include a tiny alien called Kilowatt whose domed head lights up when scared, there’s enough monkey business to make it worth the orbit.