"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is a taut, well-acted, not very scary, not very hard to figure out serial-killer mystery revolving around two adults with trust issues, still driving around in a Taurus along the back roads of Northern Virginia and West Virginia over a couple of gray, snowy days. Sounds like a flop, correct?

Even in my sincere belief that I enjoyed returning to the dark, dysfunctional world of former FBI agents Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson), I have this eerie sixth sense that most everyone who ever dwelt in an Internet chat forum devoted to the show in its heyday will walk away disappointed in one way or another because of what this "X-Files" doesn't have: It doesn't have the original show's elaborately embroidered conspiracy theories (you really can watch it cold, with zero X-filler required). Other than a few old-fashioned camera moves, it has no special effects (to my eye, there's not a single trick of CGI, which I propose as a plus). It doesn't have ghosts, chupacabras, alien honeybees or mysterious helicopters, even though creator-director Chris Carter and co-conspirator Frank Spotnitz do alight upon a new, au courant kind of creepazoid: priests.

Even the show's "shippers" (those fans who hung on every spoken and unspoken flicker of a Mulder-Scully relationship, hence the nickname) might be surprised by how grown-up our sleuths became when we weren't looking. The paranormal gives way to normal. With simple sanity and a refreshing lack of flash, Mulder and Scully capably lay out the dull evidence: Our big summer movies are part of a plot to trash our minds. I want to believe Mulder and Scully are correct.

-- Hank Stuever (July 25, 2008)

Contains violence, some gore, creepiness, adult themes.