'X-Files' seems to be a mutant

When Gillian Anderson first reunites with her "X-Files" co-star David Duchovny in this, the second spinoff movie from the sci-fi TV series, she finds him much as she did in the pilot episode 15 years ago: with his back to her, crouched over a crowded desk. On the wall is the same fuzzily photographed poster of a flying saucer that hovered above that desk for nine seasons, emblazoned with the now-iconic credo, "I Want to Believe."

This nostalgic opening gesture is quickly replaced by a rude awakening. Duchovny wheels around to reveal that his character, Fox Mulder, tireless tracker of inexplicable phenomena for the FBI and perennial thorn in the bureau's side, is looking, well, tired. His firebrand insolence is still in there somewhere, behind an unkempt beard, but it has been subdued by one too many years of fighting uphill battles.

Chris Carter, the director of "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" and father of the cultish Fox Network show, wants to assure us from the outset that nothing, and everything, has changed. This was Carter's M.O. throughout the winding trajectory of his series, which was forever morphing in personality while keeping Duchovny's Mulder and Anderson's agent Dana Scully locked in a state of philosophical (and sexual) tension. He was the believer, she the skeptic; he softened her with alien abduction theory, she blinded him with science.

Even at its stride, "The X-Files" was a load of malarkey. But it was thoughtful malarkey and compulsively watchable. One could say the same about the first two-thirds of "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" before it spins out of control and into a delirious plane of awfulness.

In his efforts to resurrect some of the spooky-ooky chill of the series, Carter has sacrificed the self-kidding regard toward his FBI protagonists that it took the better part of nine years to cultivate.

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" evokes the gloom and earnestness of many of the early episodes as it finds its once-feisty duo in the more reflective mode of middle years and at a self-protective distance from their former occupations.

As in countless aging-investigator thrillers, Mulder is summoned out of retirement by the very agency that sent him packing. It seems a female FBI agent is among the women being kidnapped in a wintry patch of rural West Virginia, where bodies and body parts are turning up under the ice and snow. The divining rod for these ghoulish discoveries is Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a defrocked priest with a history of sexual abuse and a facility for psychic visions.