Review: The Box

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Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) are an average couple struggling to make ends meet. They live a simple and plesant life in rural Richmond, Virginia in 1976 with their one son, Walter. The movie opens with a doorbell ring at 5:45 a.m. Norma thumps downstairs and looks through the peephole to see a black car drive off. Upon opening the door, she discovers a square brown package on her doorstep. Inside, she and her husband find a wooden box with a red button protected by a glass 

dome, locked with a key, and a note stating that Mr. Steward (Academy Award winner Frank Langella) will come at 5 p.m.

Arthur works at NASA in optics and Norma works as a teacher at a private school. One of her students remarks on her limp, after which she shows her class her mutated right foot, missing four toes. Later that day, Norma returns home and confesses her fear of losing their home, due to lack of money, to her husband. That is when Arlington Steward appears at their door.

Steward gives the couple the ultimate choice. If they push the button in the box, they will receive a million dollars, but someone they do not know will die. Or, they can not take the million dollars and not push the button. They are given 24 hours in which to decide. They agonize over the decision and, suffice it to say, what they decide leaves The Lewis family searching for hope and reason.

The Box is a complicated and sketchy story that’s been reused and recycled time and time again. The plot line makes a sharp turn from a suspenseful psychological thriller into a sci-fi mystery mistake of a movie including mind control slaves, watery gateways and omniscient employers. The Box is as tired and fake as Cameron Diaz’s Southern accent. Grade: D-
–Kate Kahler, The Patriot Press

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