It's been a long wait since The X Files ended its run in 2002, with multiple questions unanswered, and numerous conspiracies still up in the air. By the time I saw Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) cuddling in bed together and weeping over their failed attempt at a relationship I started to wonder, "Where have I been for the past ten years?" Admittedly, I was never the biggest X-Phile even when the series debuted in the 1990s, and even though I acknowledge that creator Chris Carter's dry sense of humor and obsessive attention to detail in scientific theorizing permeates much of today's network television.

The X Files: I Want To Believe will probably leave die-hard fans unsatisfied, since the movie swerves off the road of alien abductions and the series' ongoing "mytharc." Longtime viewers may perceive this 105 minute film as an extra long episode of the 1998 season, one of the various "Monster-of-The-Week" experiments. The film begins six years after the events of the series finale, when a young woman is abducted at her rural home in Somerset, West Virginia. FBI investigators are following hippie priest Joseph Fitzpatrick Crissman (played by Billy Connolly), who supposedly has psychic visions along with an unhealthy lust for Catholic altar boys. Dana Scully is now a staff physician at a Catholic hospital and is treating a patient with Sandhoff disease, a terminal brain condition. However, when the FBI asks for Scully's help to find Fox Mulder, she can't help but get involved, buttering a bitter Mulder up for one last return. Turns out the FBI is still incompetent all these years later and needs Mulder's help in investigating the disappearances of several women.

Story wise, there's not much to see here. This is dated freakshow familiarity and doesn't quite live up to the classic X-Files grandeur, a show that always seemed to jump the shark on a weekly basis. What makes the show worthwhile is the personal drama unfolding between the two formerly flirty and now sexually blase agents--a melodrama that Carter has apparently denied us, and one that even now, he only gives us with sparing glimpses between plot-driven scenes.

The strengths of the film are there, if perhaps too subtle for our starved palettes. It's a stroke of brilliance to leave the story's only chance for faithful redemption in the withered hands of a pedophiliac priest. It's this sort of cruel irony that won so many X-Files fans over in the first place. This issue alone was worth turning into a better movie. However, Carter and Duchovny are underestimating The X-Files decomposing market, one that, in their own admission, has been overshadowed by more macabre thrills to be found in The Dark Knight.

As far as the romance between Mulder and Scully goes, in The X Files: I Want To Believe, it ends just as anticlimactically as their entire TV relationship was restrained and ineffectual. It's the type of grand romance that The Remains of the Day's Mr. Stevens would find perfectly acceptable. Meanwhile, the film leaves us former X-Files viewers cold, still feeling jilted by a friend after six years of patience, and then given a harsh slap across our frozen shoulders. Grade: B-