My Review: The Box (2/10)

¨Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work with it. You drive home with it. You sit in your home, staring into a box. It erodes your sole, while the box that is your body inevitably withers... then dies. Where upon it is placed in the ultimate box, to slowly decompose.¨

(2/10) The Box had a pretty interesting premise: A mysterious man comes to a home and offers a family an opportunity of a lifetime. He gives them a box that has a button on it and tells them that if they push the button two things will happen. First they will receive a million dollars, and second somebody they don`t know will die. So in a way the entire movie focused on this Shakespearean dilemma: To push or not to push the button, that is the question. Richard Kelly, better known for directing the cult movie Donnie Darko and then later on the less successful Southland Tales, directs this movie based on Richard Matheson`s short story entitled ¨Button, Button.¨ I was expecting a lot more from this sci-fi mystery movie, but The Box drags during almost the entire two hours. The characters are just not that interesting and we actually don`t care about them. There are several weird characters and a lot of questions that the movie raises and then fails to answer. When The Box finally ended I felt that there had been so many things unsaid and way too many unnecessary elements introduced in the movie. The dialogue was horrible as well and there were very few rescuable moments in the entire film (one being Frank Langella). In order for a mystery film to be successful some of the questions raised during the movie should have to be answered, and in The Box this wasn`t the case.

The movie begins with a ring at the door of the Lewis family. Norma (played by Cameron Diaz with a sort of southern accent) opens the door and finds a box lying on the floor with a note saying it is from Arlington Steward. She shows the box to her husband, Arthur (played by James Marsden from Enchanted) and neither of them have any idea who the man is. The movie moves on and we follow each of these characters to their jobs. Norma is a school teacher who has a problem with her foot as she only has one toe due to an incident she suffered years ago. In one of the weirdest scenes of the movie one of the students asks her to show them her foot and she agreeingly does so. From this point on I was a bit disappointed with how the story was developing. The movie lost me when Cameron Diaz`s character decided to show off her foot to the entire class room. Norma ends up losing her job because they are reducing some of the classes for the next semester. Arthur on the other hand works for NASA and he is a well known scientist, but something goes wrong with his psychological test and he isn´t allowed to travel. From this point on it is obvious that the Lewis`s are being played and forced into a position in which they will have to push the button. After these strange things occur, Arlington (Frank Langella from Frost/Nixon) visits Norma and explains to her the consequences of pushing the button. He has a strange appearance since he is missing part of his face (his appearance is the closest thing I have seen to Harvey Dent when he turns into Two Face in the Dark Knight). The reason Arlington is missing part of his face is because he was hit by lightning and declared dead for a couple of hours before waking up at the morgue. What happened to him continues to be a mystery. The plot continues from this point on dealing with the box and the consequences their actions might bring.

Richard Kelly does try to make interesting and original films; no one can argue that his movies are different from most mainstream Hollywood films. However being original is one thing and being entertaining is another and The Box isn`t entertaining at all. The movie leaves too many questions unanswered that it shouldn´t have even risen in the first place if they were not going to tackle them later on. Who was Arlington working for? Was he simply a messenger like he said he was? Who were his employees actually and where did they come from? I just found many of the mysteries the movie had to be pointless. All I can say is that Arlington will not have to worry about us spending all our time staring at a box if more movies like this one continue to come out. I think the highlight of the movie was Frank Langella`s performance, but that was about the only positive thing about The Box. I would definitely recommend people to skip this movie.