There ain’t nothin’ inside this ‘Box’

There’s a strong wind outside rustling up the snow, covering roads which are already coated with ice. There’s not enough of a mess for the plows to plow, but plenty to make driving the last thing you want to do… compounded by temperatures and an overall State Of Shit that makes you want to stay inside and hole up until spring arrives, which won’t come a moment too soon. My skin’s pasty white, my hair’s got split ends and the winter weight has me eight or nine pounds heavier than I was three months ago. While not what you’d call an athletic man, I do enjoy being active outdoors and try to run five miles a day, every other day weather permitting — which hasn’t been the case since mid-January. Some scoff at my running, believing it a waste of time and energy, but it keeps the weight down, prevents me from having to upsize my wardrobe, and allows me a life free from blood pressure and cholesterol medication.

    I’m telling you all of that to pad what would be a review of the film The Box (2009), now out on DVD. It stars Cameron Diaz as a schoolteacher who’s missing part of her foot and Frank Langella as a government employee missing part of his face. They’re connected by the titular object, and if Cameron and her husband (James Marsden) push the button inside its small glass dome, they’ll kill someone somewhere on the planet and get $1 million for their meager efforts. Yes, it sounds like a no-brainer (my hand would be down on that thing faster than you can say “yee-haw”), but the whole situation is entwined with a larger conspiracy plot that involves floating masses of water and people with ESP and chronic nosebleeds. It takes place in a contemporary take on 1976, where the teens possess the sullenness of Gen X, right down to their annoying thousand-yard stares.

    It was written and directed by Richard Kelly, who made the cult favorite Donnie Darko (2001). As with that earlier picture, he displays little regard for pacing to where every scene feels leaden and melancholy, and his source material for The Box is Richard Matheson’s “Button, Button”, a short story way too short for Kelly’s bloated two-hour running time. (It was previously adapted for TV’s Twilight Zone, the bogus series that ran in the ‘80s, in a version ultimately disowned by Matheson.) After thirty or forty minutes of The Box, tedium sets in and staying awake becomes more of a concern than that ugly little CGI dent in Frank Langella’s head. What it’s all about is of little concern, because The Box is as hollow as the title implies.