What if you could re ceive $1 million tax-free dollars in cash for killing a stranger simply by pushing a button?
If the premise of “The Box” sounds like it would make a dandy half-hour TV show, rest assured that this Richard Matheson story has already served as a most likely more entertaining 1985 episode of the “Twilight Zone” reboot.
Writer-director Richard Kelly — he of the cult hit “Donnie Darko” and the dreadful “Southland Tales” — is not terribly successful in fleshing the material out to feature length.
After a slightly promising start, this great-looking but ultimately deeply confusing and unscary sci-fi/horror opus turns into a quite boring rehash of M. Night Shyamalan’s post-“Signs” films.
For starters, you never quite buy Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as the suburban couple who are offered a box with the death button by a disfigured Mephistophelean stranger (Frank Langella, fine as always).
The husband is an aspiring astronaut at NASA’s Virginia center, and she’s a teacher with a disfigurement of her own. She needs an operation, and they could use the money to pay their teenage son’s tuition at a private school.
Unfortunately, it’s 1976 and home-equity loans haven’t yet been invented.
So they push the button. Somebody dies. But the husband breaks one of the stranger’s rules and, as the latter puts it, “there are consequences.”
All this button-pushing — and even more extreme, if inexplicable, tests — is part of an intergalactic experiment being supervised by the stranger, with the help of NASA and the National Security Agency.
I may have dozed through the explanation for this cooperation, and I didn’t really understand the part about why so many characters develop nosebleeds before turning into zombies.
There are some nifty water effects and lots of mumbo-jumbo about “eternal damnation.”
When the husband proclaims, “It’s a place neither here nor there,” I wasn’t sure if he was describing the afterlife or reciting some Led Zeppelin lyrics.
It doesn’t help that “The Box” appears to have been edited with Ron Popeil’s Chop-O-Matic. Perhaps that’s why TV coverage of the July Fourth Bicentennial celebration somehow turns up in a scene set in December.