I think I'd push the button. I have to admit, when I first saw the trailer for The Box, I didn't think much of the story. A creepy stranger (Frank Langella) offers a woman (Cameron Diaz) a million dollars to push a button -- the catch being that, when she does, someone she doesn't know will die. Sure, if this happened to you, there'd be some questions you'd want answered. Like, how likely is it that I'll get caught? Is this a bad person I'd be killing? What's that button hooked up to, anyway? Most importantly, will the million dollars be in cash, and do I have to pay taxes? I realize that these questions say more about me than about the movie, but admit it -- you'd be thinking the same thing.
Oooooh ... spooky! Depending on your point of view, the fact that The Box is directed by the same fellow who brought us Donnie Darko will either be a selling point or a giant red flag. And the premise, based on a 10-page short story ("Button, Button") by Richard Matheson, has all the hallmarks of a clunky C-level thriller. And, essentially, that's what it is. But The Box is also surprisingly compelling, throwing the moral dilemma inherent in Langella's proposal squarely on the table -- of course, it helps that the film is set in 1976, when a million bucks went a lot further. Unfortunately, director Richard Kelly goes a tad overboard with the spooky sense of dread, taking even the most innocuous moments and making it feel like something terrible is going to happen at any moment! There's a TV-movie feel to much of his direction, as if he doesn't trust the material to be weird enough, so he has to trowel on the melodrama with a heavy hand.
Cameron Diaz -- college professor? Diaz is fine here, turning in a decent performance even though she's not entirely convincing as a literature professor who's fascinated by Satre's No Exit (again, Kelly milks this in an overly obvious fashion). But James Marsden, as her husband, is in far over his head. He simply doesn't have the chops to play a character with any intensity, nor is he able to convey more than three basic emotions. This, combined with an overly long running time of 118 minutes and a plot that could have been resolved early on with a simple conversation, makes it hard to recommend The Box. It's occasionally bizarre, sometimes funny, but full of too many redundant scenes and clunky stretches, with a silly conclusion.