'The Box.' Directed by Richard Kelly.

Directed by: Richard Kelly.

Written by: Richard Kelly. Based on the short story ‘Button, Button’ by Richard Matheson.

Starring: Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and Frank Langella.

Budget: $25-30 Million.

Gross revenue: $32, 924, 206.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for sci-fi, and The Box promised something a little bit different to the blockbuster sci-fi of films that we’re all used to. Instead of crazy alien races and a messianic hero, we get a regular couple who are faced with a moral conundrum: They are given a box by a mysterious, disfigured man that has a red button on the top of it. The man tells them that if they push the button, someone that they don’t know will die, and they will be given one million dollars for their trouble.

Richard Kelly, who directed the brilliant Donnie Darko, is obviously a fan of The Twilight Zone, and this movie plays out like a modern, extended episode. You get the sense that each shot has been elaborately planned and inserted in order to maximise the "Holy-shit-something-is-under-my-bed-I-just-know-it-is!" tension that lasts for a lot of the movie. Kelly doesn’t resort to crazy special effects, or seat-jump moments to get his scares. Instead, he uses far simpler, classic tactics that create a haunting weirdness that just might sit in a viewer long after the credits have rolled. The moment when Langella’s creepy Mr. Steward informs Diaz over the phone that he is in her backyard, only to have Diaz turn around and see some random old guy, eyes wide open and mouth agape, watching her, is the stuff of skank-weed induced nightmares.

It’s not all beer and skittles though. Cameron Diaz is an overrated actress and throughout the film her portrayal of the scientist’s wife is pretty awful. Her acting is at its worst at the beginning of the film, when she has to do a lot of character relationship dialogue. When she looks into her husband’s car and jokingly says "I hate you...", you just want to reach into the screen and flick her nose as hard as you can because she looks so ridiculous. Marsden does an alright job in this movie, but I can’t even remember one of his lines which just goes to show that the shitty actor gets the grease, because I can’t get a lot of Diaz’s terrible lines out of my head.

One thing I did like about the movie was that the husband/wife backstory was based on the lives of Richard Kelly’s parents. Kelly’s mother had her toes amputated after a doctor left her under an x-ray machine for too long, and his scientist father actually did develop a prosthetic device that enabled her to walk almost normally. Although I didn’t know this until after I watched the film, I knew that this little plot device was more meaningful than it would have been. Kelly crafted the scene where Marsden gives Diaz the prosthetic, with a tenderness that is true film-making gold.

Everything turns to shit pretty fast though, so don’t get your hopes up. At about the half-way point, the film becomes too confusing. And not in the 2001: A Space Odyssey way that commands multiple viewings. Rather, in the "Jesus-just-wrap-it-up-already!" way, where you start thinking of things you’d rather be doing than watching the movie. I sort of spaced out in the middle of the film; thinking about how they should make a movie about two badass government agents that just go around executing mother-fuckers that attempt to disrupt the American military-industrial complex. It would be a black comedy and focus on two typical sinister agents that appear in all those movies. Like those agents in E.T. that Elliot has to hide from. Only in my movie, the agents would catch up with E.T. and take him to a lab where they would perform experiments on him, and after they got all the data they needed, they just execute him and put his body in the furnace.

Also, did anyone notice that every character that ultimately decides to push the button in this movie is a woman? And they call Lars Von Trier a misogynist. Kelly is either further homaging the patronising nature of many of The Twilight Zone episodes (it was made in the 50’s after all), or he has some deep-seated mother issues.

Two Stars: