Ten long summers have passed since the last feature film version of the television series "X-Files," which must seem an eternity to fans of the popular show, who followed it with a devotion reminiscent of the "Star Trek" gang. Although the new movie reunites the famous odd couple of Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny), it may disappoint many of those students of the occult and the supernatural, as well as UFOlogists everywhere. This time around the film includes only a few of the elements that made the series a kind of cult success, and entirely ignores its traditional otherworldly delights, the vampires, ghosts, zombies, flying saucers, and space aliens - all those entities out there, as they put it, that entertained millions of viewers every week for a decade.

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" continues the fundamental and essentially unresolved dialectic of the series, opposing Scully the doubter to Mulder the believer; together they investigate unexplained phenomena, but Scully resolutely rejects any irrational interpretations, while Mulder relentlessly searches for a reality beyond the empirical. The picture's structure itself reflects that tension, following the two in separate plots that intersect in a mystery they must solve with the help of a particular individual who brings those strands together and leads both of them to that solution.

Because of his sensitivity to the supernatural, the FBI asks Scully to persuade Mulder to help on the case of an abducted female agent; they want him to work with a psychic, Father Joe (Billy Connolly), who also happens to be a defrocked pedophile priest. Father Joe sees visions of the abducted woman that Mulder interprets for the skeptical Scully and a disbelieving but desperate group of FBI agents. Now a surgeon in a Catholic hospital where she fights to save a boy with a rare brain disease, Scully, already at odds with the priests who administer the facility, particularly despises Father Joe, which complicates both the investigation and the film's theology.

A second abduction leads Mulder and the priest closer to the solution, while Scully, examining research materials for the difficult procedure she attempts, stumbles across some concrete clues to the motives and identity of their quarry. The combination of the irrational and the rational means of reaching a solution, as well as the notion of the search for a victim and the search for a cure, nicely underlines the duality that pervades the whole movie. When the priest speaks cryptically to Scully, apparently encouraging her efforts to defy her supervisors and operate on her patient, the two plots reach a common point.

The polarity of the two major characters, the conjunction of the two plots, and the duality of meaning suggests the possibilities in the movie's subtitle, "I Want to Believe." For his own personal reasons, obliquely mentioned by the other agents, Mulder seeks confirmation of his belief in the supernatural or even the extraterrestrial; conversely, despite her unyielding rejection of such matters and her defiant anticlericalism, Scully herself gropes clumsily and unwillingly toward some kind of ambiguous acceptance. The believer struggles with uncertainty while the doubter fights the temptation of faith.

The film's mostly understated depiction of those concepts achieves a greater success than the actual mystery that propels all the action. Hurrying through the unraveling with some excessively artificial suspense, the director sacrifices clarity and focus for considerable unpleasantness and a quantity of gore. The muddled and violent resolution vitiates the picture's intellectual and emotional material, undermining some its thoughtful and perfectly reasonable themes.

Despite the passage of time since they first investigated all those creepy subjects, both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson appear virtually unchanged after all their years together. At the same time, neither one achieves anything more than a merely functional performance; the frequent two-shots and tight closeups, together with a good deal of flat delivery, suggest the deleterious effects of television production, where it all began. Although this time around they actually sleep together, neither Mulder's passionate conviction nor Scully's scientific method creates what we like to think of as chemistry - they may be an odd couple, but they are also a very dull one.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

(PG-13), directed by Chris Carter.

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