The X-Files: I Want to Believe *

Dark in tone and composition, and murky and confused in plotting, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" plays like a longish TV show rather than a first-run movie, and suffers from the same over-abundance of unexplained phenomena and weirdness in the woods that made the TV series, in the end, such a bore.

Former FBI agents Fox Muldar (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are called in out of retirement to work on a case that that has some of the same characteristics of the files they used to investigate. This one involves an abducted FBI agent and a defrocked pedophile priest (Billy Connolly) having visions that may lead to her whereabouts. Scully, now working as a doctor in a Catholic hospital, brings her usual skepticism to bear, while Muldar, whose retirement life seems to consist of cutting out newspaper stories, makes the usual far-out connections that all the others seem to miss.

It's a rather flat exercise, although writer/director Chris Carter does add some atmosphere, accidents and mysteries by shooting much of the movie in the snow in West Virginia. There is an interesting update on the relationship of Muldar and Scully, which was always an intriguing subtext to the series. But there are too many howlers, like stem cell treatments in a Catholic hospital, ultimate transplants, and at least an extra limb in the snow, to take this one seriously.

Rated PG-13. 105 minutes. Chris Carter - Director / Writer (television series "The X-Files") / Producer, Frank Spotnitz - Writer / Producer, Bill Roe - Cinematographer, Mark Freeborn - Production Designer, Richard Harris - Editor. Distributed by Twentieth-Century Fox Corporation.

Principal actors: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Xzibit, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, Callum Keith Rennie, and Adam Godley.