“There are always consequences.”

Justin’s rating: It’s slammin’ time!

Justin’s review: I think all of the tension and simmering morality play atmosphere of 2009’s The Box was immediately and forever undercut when the Funny or Die sketch troop created their howlingly clever take on this situation with the 2014 video, The Button. I won’t lie, it was hard coming to this movie without thinking of that gleeful idiot slamming his hand down and going, “No deal! I choose the box!”

Well, I chose The Box too, because I like the premise of author Richard Matheson’s original 1970 short story, I was curious in director Richard Kelly’s (Donnie Darko) last movie before he went radio silent, and I haven’t seen a Cameron Diaz movie in like forever.

It’s 1976, and Norma (Diaz) and her NASA scientist husband Arthur (James Marsden) are struggling with finances when a mysterious box is dropped off at their door. As Skeletor (Frank Langella) shows up to tell them, the box contains a button that, if pressed, will kill a random person somewhere and grant them a million bucks.

That’s the familiar premise that we know from the classic five-page story and perhaps even the 1985 Twilight Zone adaptation. But that’s a pretty thin premise on which to hang a nearly two-hour movie, so Kelly embellishes The Box with a number of further twists and moral quandaries. It’s weird, it’s tense, and you know it’s heading somewhere awful — so you kind of don’t want to get there.

I’ll give it this: I had no idea where this movie was going. The unusual setting of 1976, the involvement of the NSA, a strange man with a gigantic burn scar, a babysitter who knows too much, abrupt nosebleeds, brainwashing, Sartre quotes, sinister Santas, gods of lightning, people teleporting around the globe, the Viking space probe, odd call numbers, conspiracies, demons, library portals to hell, and even aliens are crammed into this.

Like a lot of ambitious-yet-bad films I’ve seen, The Box keeps coming up with ideas but refuses to fully flesh them out before dropping them for the next thing that popped into mind. Hey, I love a good idea, believe me, but seriously — pick about three and then limit yourself to those while wrapping a tight story around them. Don’t just spew crazy all over me, grin, and then act like you did something profoundly deep.

Director Richard Kelly grabbed all our attention with Donnie Darko and then struggled to gain that kind of acceptance ever since. I think he’s brilliant, perhaps, but maybe in that slightly indecipherable way that David Lynch had. He’s great at building up unbearable tension and creating a story that stirs the imagination while not being something that we’ve seen to death already. Yet I also suspect he’s so committed to the mind-benders that he overlooks how we need explanations and closure and — oh yeah — coherent editing.

I don’t know whether I can push this film on you or not. I’m inclined to like it because of the X-Files feel and scifi angle, but the storytelling is so all over the place that nothing from about minute 35 on makes any sense. Still, it’s so unlike the typical thriller or even conspiracy flick that I hate to outright condemn it.

The Box swings wildly for the fences but without any clear direction or control. That’s bound to leave everyone, myself included, scratching their heads and wondering if Donnie Darko was just as scattershot and we fooled ourselves into believing otherwise.

Intermission!

• While I am publicly not a fan of the ’70s as the whole, it is pretty interesting to see a modern take on the decade. As with X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Box revels in gorgeous retro design. I might’ve been drooling at the family’s sleek curvy kitchen TV and NASA decor.
• The old fashioned Corn Flakes box… and that amazing kitchen wallpaper.
• “You’re kind of a geezer” at 35
• Wow, that is the creepiest student ever
• That is one heck of a burn scar
• Norma looking up at the burned guy is a tense moment
• The box being empty is freaky deeky
• Back when Christmas lights on the tree could kill you in your sleep
• Rocket car was pretty neat
• “It’s just a box.”
• “Did someone die?” “Of course.”
• NO EXIT
• Every sentence in this movie is a double entendre: “Somebody pushing your buttons?”
• That is one creepy hotel… and one huge conspiracy board
• So he sees through his brainwashed puppets? OK then.
• The police have no problem showing civilians photos of crime scenes. And then the actual crime scene itself.
• The Lightning Book
• What, your library doesn’t have secret occultic gateways that lead to damnation?
• Poking into the watery portal, that’s a Donnie Darko move.
• Gonna have to spend a chunk of that million cleaning up the water damage
• Human Resource Exploitation Manual, every good movie has one of these
• Well it’s nice the aliens will put that million into an interest-bearing account for the kid
• Why would the aliens padlock the bathroom door from the inside?