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Film Review: ‘X-Files: I Want to Believe’

“The X-Files” was one of the few TV series that I have ever gone out of my way to see each week. So I badly wanted to believe that the new film “X-Files: I Want to Believe” would resurrect those spooky and gripping glory years.

But it’s been six years since the show ended its nine-year run, and a full decade since the first “X-Files” movie. In a pop culture that measures hipness in months, if not weeks, I worried that the hiatus had simply stretched out too long, and that the thrill would be as cold as the Cigarette-Smoking Man’s corpse.

So now it’s time for the truth to be put out there, and it’s not pretty: a low-wattage plot, a shortage of thrills and, most egregiously, not an alien in sight.

Longtime “X-Files” auteur Chris Carter, who directed this film and also co-wrote the script with Frank Spotnitz, went to great lengths to keep the project under wraps and away from the rabid Internet mob. In hindsight, this clearly seems to have been done to goose the hype rather than safeguard any real surprises — because there aren’t any.

It starts out fairly promising, with that familiar spooky theme music quickly followed by the abduction of an FBI agent by two shadowy thugs. The bureau rustles up a manhunt that has agents following the lead of Father Joe (Billy Connolly in a strong performance), a repentant pedophile priest who claims to be having visions related to the case and may or may not be bonkers.

Faced with such weirdness, the FBI must reluctantly call in its weirdness expert, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), despite the fact that the TV series ended with the bureau slapping bogus charges on him and discrediting his decade of work on the X-Files, which were shut down.

Meanwhile, Mulder’s former FBI partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), is working as a doctor at a Catholic hospital. Despite his grudge against his former employer, Mulder is incapable of staying away from any case with even a whiff of the paranormal about it, and naturally he drags Scully into it as well.

I won’t reveal the plot, but it’s on the dull side, and it’s a hard disappointment to realize that it has zero to do with the ongoing conspiracy in which certain U.S. government factions seem to be secretly collaborating with aliens in advance of an E.T. invasion.

Then again, in one scene the camera lingers briefly on a character’s eerily misshapen fingernails. But Carter never expounds on that, and the film plays out as what the TV series used to call a “stand-alone” — a self-contained episode about some strangeness that remains apart from the ongoing alien plotline.

Still, longtime fans will want to check it out, and they won’t find it a total bust; Mulder gets off a few of his trademark ironic quips, and there’s an amusing bit that suggests George W. Bush might be part of the alien race’s advance team on Earth.

The themes of faith, love and trust that are deeply woven into the fabric of the “X-Files” still run strong and swift, and Duchovny and Anderson are in fine form in further deepening the complex relationship between their baggage-heavy characters.

But there’s no way around it: This is “The X-Files” playing in its minor key, a sonnet that would have been fine on TV, but falls well short of the requisite “pow” expected of a big-screen summer extravaganza, especially one with such a rich and fabled pedigree.

“X-Files: I Want to Believe” is likely to both underwhelm true believers and make newcomers wonder what all that long-ago fuss was about.

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