I've seen comedies with fewer laughs than The Box. Unfortunately, all of the laughs are completely unintentional. This is a ludicrous, overstuffed, and overblown thriller that is filled with half-baked plot points, and dialogue that only a screenwriter could love. Not only is this a hopelessly muddled movie, but it frequently mistakes confusion for mystery.

The film is written and directed by Richard Kelly, who rose to fame with the 2001 indie cult favorite, Donnie Darko, and then pretty much fell from it with his 2006 follow up, Southland Tales. The Box is (in his words) his commercial film, but I fail to picture what kind of audience a movie such as this is supposed to attract. It takes the effective short story, "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson, and then drowns it in unnecessary, convoluted sci-fi elements. Such elements include gateways to the afterlife, mind control, nose bleeds, aliens (I think), men who were struck by lightning and are now missing part of their face, water-like vortexes appearing in the middle of public libraries, and one deformed foot that was the result of an accident with a doctor's x-ray machine. The audience at my screening was laughing out loud with each plot development.

But before we get to all that, we're introduced to a married couple named Norma (Cameron Diaz, sporting one of the worst fake Southern accents I've heard in a while.) and Arthur (James Marsden). They're a fairly well off couple with a kid (Sam Oz Stone), but money problems are starting to creep up. Arthur, who works at NASA, didn't get that astronaut position he was hoping for, and Norma (a teacher) needs her deformed foot fixed , and is hit by bad financial news at the school where she works. Early one morning, a wooden box with a red button is left on their doorstep. Later that same day, a man by the name of Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) rings their doorbell. He's the previously mentioned man who is missing part of his face, a fact Norma is able to overlook quite easily because gosh darn it, she knows how it feels to be different, because of her foot. (She tells him this in a hilariously long-winded monologue.) Arlington makes them an offer. If they push the button on the box, someone they don't know will die, and they will receive one million dollars.

After much emotional wrangling and going back and forth, Norma pushes the button. They get the money, and Arlington leaves with a fairly ominous warning that he will deliver the box to someone else, and if they push it, someone they don't know will die, hinting that it could be Norma or Arthur. Oh, if only it were that simple. From this point, the movie takes a nose dive right off the path of coherency, and slips into a series of ideas and plot elements that are either given little to no explanation, or probably would have been better off being left out. This movie needed a director that could weed through Kelly's numerous ideas, and pick out which ones worked and which didn't. As it stands, nothing works here. I admit, I was intrigued at first. Kelly is obviously trying to tell a Twilight Zone-like story about greed and valuing human life. But whatever message or ideas The Box tries to impart are buried underneath a lot of exposition and confused story telling.

This isn't just a bad movie, it's an annoyingly bad movie. We're informed at the beginning that the movie is set in 1976 for no reason that I can discern. Therefore, we get a lot of blatant 70s references, like the beyond ugly wallpaper in the home of the main couple, which actually becomes distracting. And just to make sure we really know the movie is set in the 70s, we get a lot of TV sound bites from the era blasting in the background, like the Bicentennial and advertisements for the TV sitcom What's Happening. This obviously holds some nostalgic value for Kelly, but it has no place in the story. And then there is the obnoxious music score, which constantly pounds away at your senses, and underscores each scene with the subtlety of a jackhammer. It's distracting almost from the moment it enters the film. The performances, as well, are largely over the top. Only Langella displays any credibility as the soft-spoken, yet ominous Arlington Steward. Diaz seems to be concentrating only on not letting her bad accent slip (which it occasionally does), while Marsden simply looks befuddled most of the time.
I'm sure that devotees of the director will view The Box as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, but there's just too much off here. The performances, the music, the editing, the writing...It's impossible to take it seriously as it goes along. Whatever point the movie was trying to make is lost long before the thing is over. And when it's finally done, you walk out shaking your head, wondering how something like this got the green light. Maybe some mysteries are better left unsolved.

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