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The Box

More like, The Crap.

Premise

This movie should have skipped all the space/employer stuff and followed the example of Indecent Proposal- focus on the consequences to the couple. That was the story presented and the movie went way off-course and became unintelligible.

Character

The fault lines of an awful movie appear early. From what I recall here, there were tremors of repetitious and unnecessary dialogue. Then the first rumbling was Cameron Diaz’s reaction to the button offer; rather than dismiss it as a joke, she asked seriously, “Are you for real”? and something else that made her look stupid.

Then there was much more unnecessary dialogue with her husband, James Mardsen. The major quake in all this was that the two of them took the offer seriously when there was not a shred of evidence to indicate it was real. It was laughable that they dismissed the notion of going to the police just because the box man, Frank Langella, said they could not. (Yet, from their POV, what would the police have been able to do?!) James could have pressed the button in jest, to show his wife it was meaningless. Yes, that would have defeated the moral angle of the story, so the proper setup would have been Langella demonstrating a supernatural ability.

This would have required one more aspect to succeed- the couple in a truly desperate financial situation. As it was, I only sensed a tiny setback to their standard of living and had no worries that a teacher and scientist would have any trouble getting over it.

This boiled down to empathy- rather than relate to the characters, I wanted them to be the next ones to die.

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