The Box

Review By: Ryan Hamelin
RyanHamelin@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: C

This is a crying shame. Richard Kelly, the USC graduate behind the cult classic Donnie Darko, really seemed poised to break into the mainstream. His follow up, Southland Tales, was met with scathing reviews and several prolonged re-edits that did little to help make the final project cohesive. Many found the script overly complicated, pushing past even Kelly’s own previous complexity and into a realm of sensory overload. With The Box, many expected him to tone back his heady plot intricacies and focus on what made Darko such a resounding success, a well-developed narrative. Taking his lead from a short story by Richard Matheson also seemed like a positive move. Basing something off a Twilight Zone veteran and the author of I Am Legend looks, on paper, as though it could successfully ground the writing and make for a marketable and accessible film going experience. In some ways it succeeds in this regard, but it more than makes up for such victories with colossal breaks in tone and character which we neither fully understand nor honestly believe.

Let us think, for a moment, about whether the premise of the film is enough to hold you through a feature length runtime. Family receives a box. Box has big red button. If you push the big red button within 24 hours, someone you don’t know will die, and you will receive a payment of one million dollars. So already you’ve set up two blocks of time which you have to work really hard to make suspenseful. The beginning of the film, without the box involved at all, which the audience will know is all character development and otherwise meaningless exposition, and the period before the button is pressed, as you know it has to be, in which various characters find out things about their life that would cause them to be more likely to push the damn button.

Surprisingly, it is in this first act that the movie is easily at its strongest. The characters are likable, even when Cameron Diaz is attempting her horribly fake accent, and considering that the couple are based off of Richard Kelly’s own parents, the dialogue is understandably layered and interesting. His father really did work as part of the Viking program crafting lenses, his mother really did have a tragic accident occur involving an X-ray of her foot, and Kelly really did grow up in a similar house in the year 1976 when the film was based. Knowing all that really only gives you a sense of why the beginning of the film is so strong and engrossing, and once the device is introduced, why the believability factor could begin to spiral out of control.

After the button is pressed, the gears start moving at a frantic pace, and with Frank Langella popping up periodically in one of his more wonderful performances, you will find yourself, whether you like it or not, strapped in for the ride. Who ...