By the time The X-Files: I Want to Believe makes the second reference to its own title (in the first half-hour!), it's hard to not feel like the whole thing is a little perfunctory and unnecessary. Maybe it's that David Duchovny's scratchy facial hair has gotten skeezier, or that Gillian Anderson's ice-queen act no longer serves her age. Either way, it's difficult to muster the same excitement when the six notes from the theme song come on and you know that, yes, there is something out there—and you've still got another two hours left of people scrambling in the dark to discover it.

Ten years have passed since Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) wanted to believe for the first time on the big screen, so you'll understand if they're a little more jaded this time around. Scully has ditched the FBI to work as a full-time physician, while Mulder still collects junk in his home office. They're called back into action by Billy Connolly's character, a psychic pedophile who talks cryptically, has visions of young girls being attacked (go get 'em Mulder!), and generally just gets way too much screen time. Though he's the catalyst for the story, his greatest contribution to the plot is that he goads Scully into a battle between what's paranormal and what's spiritual. This was always what made the best episodes of the original series genuinely creepy—and therefore worthwhile. Unfortunately, it just doesn't follow through.

There are a few glib political hits (Scully and Mulder stare blankly at a portrait of George W. Bush)—and of course at some point Anderson has to tell a male agent to "let me talk to someone with some balls"—but for the most part the movie lacks in the suspense of the television series or the summer-blockbuster spectacle of the first film. The case at hand—this would be the kidnapped girls and their lascivious Russian captors—feels less like X-Files and more like an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. You're sticking around for something gruesome, but in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, what you get is a shot of a two-headed dog.

In the end, Mulder warns Scully: "the darkness finds you." Which, we guess, means that if another X-Files installment does happen to surface, maybe it'll get back to the basics: alien light shows and things that jump out in the night. And then maybe we'll have a movie with some balls.