Press button, make movie die

Whatever you do, do not accept delivery of The Box, a package that doesn't know where it is going nor how to get there.

You may already be aware of the premise - unless you were somehow able to escape the film's saturation ad campaign.

A couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) are contacted by Steward (Frank Langella), a dapper stranger with one side of his face so hideously disfigured, you can see molars through a hole in his cheek.

Steward offers them a Faustian bargain: Press a button on a device he carries, and "someone, somewhere in the world, whom you don't know, will die." In return, they will receive a cool million in cash.

What will they do? What will they do?

That's the last coherent question The Box poses. The ads strongly imply a suspense film in which their family's lives are imperiled by their decision regarding the device.

Ah, but director Richard (Donnie Darko) Kelly is after far bigger game. Could it be a Yeti? We'll never know, because whatever it is eludes Kelly completely.

The Box begins in a realistic style and then, without warning, veers off into supernatural, perhaps interplanetary mumbo-jumbo, which is then further obscured by a patina of murky existentialism. Sartre is name-checked regularly.

Suffice it to say, there is far more at stake in pressing the button than extinguishing a single stranger's life.

Kelly, who also wrote the script, ladles out his lumpy plot at a maddeningly slow pace. The Box is a classic example of what happens when a director is hopelessly infatuated with his own material.

Before you can begin to ponder the film's central enigma, you have to wade through a lot of distractions.

For instance, you know it's the '70s because Alice is on TV and the wallpaper is garish. But why bother to set this in the past? Did the studio have a fleet of '70s clunkers it wanted to show off?

That's one of many pointless affectations. This is the type of film in which an accent and a limp serve as stand-ins for character.

Diaz and Marsden don't make a very convincing couple, either. Though they're roughly the same age, his boyish face makes him look like he could be her little brother.

If you make it to the end of this cockamamie cosmic parable, it's hard to say what will be more taxed: your credence or your patience.

Mark this one "Return to Sender."