Two ex-FBI agents wrestle over professional ethics in rural West Virginia. Hard choices have to be made in deep snow to save lives by extreme measures. As in the opening episode of Fox TV’s nine-season series “The X-Files,” Dana (Gillian Anderson) enters the messy office of Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). As in 1993, when they first met in his FBI office, Fox still has a poster proclaiming “I Want to Believe.” Chris Carter, that show’s creator, now directs a screenplay he co-wrote with co-producer Frank Spotnitz, who earlier wrote forty-eight of the TV episodes. One of the small screen’s most watchable couples is yanked into service to locate an abducted FBI agent. The call comes from Assistant Special Agent in Charge Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet), who takes a chance on the renegade investigator turned recluse. “I’m not the most popular gal at the FBI,” she allows. In an echo of the Fox-Scully pairing, she works with a disbeliever, Agent Mosley Drummy (rapper Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner). Those two characters are better named than played. Clues about the abductee come from the bleeding-from-his-eyes visions of pedophile priest, Father Joe (Billy Connolly). True to “X-Files” form, the plot entertains two possibilities: he’s psychic or he’s an accessory to one or more abductions. Tracking the abductors—who are only alien by passport, not planetary address—unfolds as an above-average genre exercise. Eye-rollers include a “Vertigo” plummet by a member of law enforcement, and a little bit of laughably inept dialogue. But the film’s heart is found in debating matters of faith: if Christ came to Quantico. Scully tries a risky stem-cell procedure on a terminally ill boy at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital; the abductor uses different human tissue for highly unorthodox surgery to keep his ill lover alive. Proverbs 25:2, prayer and two-headed dogs are ingredients, along with too many lines about ass. There’s no plot overlap with “The X-Files” film of 1998, but first-season fans of the “Beyond the Sea” episode may experience deja vu. In light of Carter’s fixation on the “darkness” that imperils FBI agents, it’s time he turns his audaciously dark “Millennium” series into a feature. With Adam Godley, Sarah-Jane Redmond, Callum Keith Rennie, Fagin Woodcock and Nicki Aycox. 104m. (Bill Stamets)
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