The X-Files: I Want to Believe ( **1/2 )

103 minutes

In theaters July 25, 2008

Rating: PG-13, Thriller

I wanted to believe, I really did. So do all the X-Philes out there. But the third act of The X-Files: I Want to Believe is just unbelievable. Literally.

Of course, that doesn't stop this sequel from having its moments and getting under your skin and giving you something to think about afterward. It's just that it's been a long time between drinks and we wish our thirst was being more fully quenched.

The science fiction mystery-thriller, The X-Files, was the movie version of the hit TV series about unexplainable phenomena -- aliens, monsters, conspiracies, and such -- that first aired in 1993 and ran for nine years.

It's been a decade since the first movie version, but the first sequel, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which ignores the convoluted mythology of the TV series, stands alone. Viewers need never have sampled the series to follow along. But whereas the first film seemed a super-episode of the series -- and an effective big-screen transplantation -- the followup is more of a stand-alone thriller, with the impact of, say, an average epsiode.

The story is set six years after the time of the television finale, which was indeed six years ago. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles as paranormal-investigating FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the believer and the skeptic, respectively.

They've quit the FBI, with Mulder retired and reclusive and Scully working as a dedicated physician. The film opens with a crime in which a man driving a tractor captures a young woman. Then teams of FBI agents follow a priest/psychic, played by Billy Connolly, to the scene of the crime. When a female FBI agent also goes missing, the Agency contacts Mulder through Scully. Maybe they could help agents Amanda Peet and Xzibit by taking on one more baffling case.

Chris Carter -- who created the television series and wrote and produced the first film, The X Files -- co-wrote the script with Frank Spotnitz and this time takes the directorial reins. Carter has been careful not to disenfranchise newcomers by playing exclusively, or even primarily, to rabid fans of the TV series. Oh, there are in-jokes and cameos that fans will pick up on, but they don't distract or confuse anyone else or detract from the narrative. This one's been fashioned for the casual viewer.

Carter quickly establishes and then sustains the paranoic mood -- creepy, gloomy, and disturbing are the primary colors in his palette -- and lets the faith-versus-science subtext register throughout as it affects most of the major characters. He has made this second big-screen installment more intimate and character-driven, with the six-years-down-the-line relationship between Scully and Mulder in the center ring much of the time. And he ratchets up the tension and scare quotient not with showy, graphic special effects but with insinuating, resonant imagery during a teasingly slow reveal: he's much more interested in making the audience think than gasp.

One could, however, question his choice of what aspect of his series to concentrate on in this isolated feature film, as well as the level of explicitness both throughout and in the solution to the central mystery. But not without tiptoeing into spoiler territory.

Duchovny and Anderson do contribute an atypically fascinating lead movie couple. Both actors wear their familiar roles comfortably, and Anderson is expecially compelling and affecting.

The film has been skillfully crafted and imaginatively plotted. The problem is that the story itself fails to generate much in the way of either emotional involvement or intellectual curiosity. It just kind of plays itself out, its resolution neither terribly insinuating nor satisfying in and of itself.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is an absorbing but underachieving supernatural thriller about the provocatively unexplained. As for that that subtitle: Wanted to. Tried to. Couldn't. Not quite.