REVIEW: ‘The Box’

Reality TV has made a nice little business out of getting people to do bizarre and/or reprehensible things for money. Wheel, deal, backstab and eat bugs – we’ve seen people do almost anything for the Almighty Buck.

But would you kill for it?

“The Box” Rated PG-13 • 115 minutes Starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella Written and Directed by: Richard Kelly RCC Rating: Worth Watching On DVD

That’s the question raised in director Richard Kelly’s (“Donnie Darko”) latest effort, “the Box”. Based on a story by venerable genre scribe Richard Mathewson, the movie follows a financially-strapped young couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) who are given a box with a single button on it from a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella). He reveals to them two things will happen when they press the button: one, they will receive one million dollars and two, some one in the world, whom they don’t know, will die.

What should have followed should have been a fairly straightforward story about the repercussions of getting such a “gift”. Something… anything would have been preferable to the schizophrenic mess that was trotted out. We start with a distinct lack of character development. It’s especially disappointing when you have a cast that ranges from solid to outstanding (you decide who’s who) who could really do something with their characters, but instead are simply cardboard cutouts moving from scene to scene.

Mix in any number of story angles they try to hit. Is it a morality tale? An alien invasion story? A paranoid government thriller? There’s a little bit of everything in here and none of them are done particularly well. They are, as Mrs. Terror Scribe might describe them, watermelons. What is a watermelon you ask? A watermelon is something inexplicable put into the story (for the original watermelon, check out “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”). It makes you curious but is never explained and never touched on again. And trust me; we have a whole patch of watermelons here.

Yet, still with so many elements, the story feels empty, like the run time was three sizes too large. Towards the very obvious ending, I caught myself thinking, “Isn’t this over yet?” Not a good sign for any movie. While I’m sure this was an excellent Twilight Zone episode back in 1986 (when it actually part of the show’s incarnations), it wasn’t put together well enough to make an engaging feature.