The Box - Movie Review - Spoiler Alert

There are certain standards I apply to watching a movie, bad being when I demand the producer pay me for the hours I just lost watching their creation. This was one such movie, I want my hour and a half of life back I lost on this one!!

Why Cameron Diaz thought when this script came her way that it was a good idea to take is beyond me.

The movie starts out well enough, although Norma, Cameron's character, getting distraught about a small financial crisis (her son's PRIVATE school tuition will no longer be subject to a discount which she had received as a benefit as teacher at the same institution) is a bit much. Her husband works for NASA and it is clear he has job security. They live in an affluent neighborhood in Richmond, VA in a large Colonial home for just 3 people and hubby drives a brand new Corvette Stingray. Cry me a river on your finances, they live (gasp) paycheck to paycheck because living outside of the city in a smaller and modest home was never an option she considered.

So when a man with a face that looks like a Rottweiler took a chunk out of arrives to explain the box, which is called the button, explains how all her financial woes can be eliminated if she presses the red button, Norma is interested. A million dollars just to press a button. The catch, because there is always a catch when the half-faced Amway sales person arrives on your doorstep, is someone she does not know will die somewhere in the world. There are rules blah blah blah, of course, Norma presses the button, a lady across town dies, they get their money, hubby tries to return it, too late!

Now the premise to me was intriguing, I would have found the movie more interesting if it stayed with the button only aspect, would they press it? Husband and wife debating, walking past it, waking in the middle of the night. A study of human nature regarding greed vs. morality. I would have preferred the man to have a whole face, but that would have made the whole magical and science fiction aspect pointless, he had to have a visible deformity to make the whole box even more interesting...not.

You see, the man, Mr. Steward who is not Mr. Steward, it is just his body that his employers (you are supposed to believe some alien presence from below the surface of Mars which are better than humans in all regards, intelligence, ethics, morality, humanity - I guess that would be Martianity - entered his body via lightning when a camera probe was sent to Mars by NASA) which we are not privy to know who they are, are using him as a vessel to deliver the button and test us all and the people who receive the button decide the entire fate of mankind. Apparently, women like to press the button, the men all just watch in mock horror in each instance while their selfish, money hungry wifes slap the button in much the same manner as Press Your Luck except in this version, you always got a Whammy. Someone dies as soon as the button rose.

There are lots of details which made me say WTF quite often, the library, the motel...portals to this other place, why the Martians would know what our supposed afterlife was even like. And there are tons of unexplained tangents, the movie had more holes than, well, Swiss cheese!

The commercials for this movie were much better than the movie itself and I bet the short story, Button Button which the screenplay is based upon was much better than the movie as well.