A Year of Movies #7: The Box

Shhh! Can you hear that? That is the death rattle of director Richard Kelly's filmmaking career. Poor thing. It started off promisingly, but after Donnie Darko it just went down the toilet.

I should say that Kelly's third film The Box is not nearly as bad as his second film Southland Tales. That movie was complete garbage. The best line in that movie was by The Rock and it was equal parts bad, terrible, and absurdly awesome "I'm a pimp...And pimps don't die." Tell that to Gary Oldman's in True Romance.

The Box, Kelly's third film, is based on a Richard Matheson short story so you expect it to be somewhat interesting. Matheson being the predecessor to Stephen King. The movie itself starts off as a pretty normal film that takes place in the mid 1970's. James Marsden and Cameron Diaz are a married couple that are having some money troubles and they are hiding it from their kid. Marsden works for NASA and is expecting to be promoted soon and that will free them from financial difficulty forever.

Well, as you can assume, Marsden doesn't get the job. The family sinks deeper into debt. Then a strange man with half of his lower jaw missing knocks on the door and offers them a way out. This is where the movie gets interesting. The man presents the couple with a wooden box and a red button. He tells them that they have 24 hours to decide whether to press the button or not. If they do they will get $1 million, but someone they don't know will die.

So it's a test. Can you live with knowledge that you caused someone's death if you get $1 million for it? The family in this movie decide they can and push the button. (This really isn't a spoiler because if they didn't push the button the movie would only be 30 minutes long so the only logical thing to do to progress the story is to push it and see what happens.) Then the movie takes a weird turn. We start to learn more about how Mr. No Jaw and Marsden's character are linked and how this whole "project" of offering the box is tied to a much larger experiment.

The problem is that by the end of the movie the several story lines have mixed and jumbled to the point that it is somewhat confusing as to what exactly is going on. You get closure to the story of Marsden and Diaz, but by the end of the movie they aren't really even minor characters in this messed up Sci-Fi morality play. Sadly, by the end I didn't care what happened to them.