Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have a terrible moral dilemma in Richard Kelly’s
“The Box”: Press a button on a mysterious container, they’ll get $1 million, and
someone they don’t know will die.

What button, on whose box, did Kelly push to get the money to make this awful,
preposterous thriller?

If Hollywood were a three-strikes, you’re-out kind of place, Kelly would be
flirting with permanent banishment. His first film, cult hit “Donnie Darko,” was
an intriguing foul ball, muddled and pretentious but showing signs of a strong
talent in search of his voice.

His second, “Southland Tales,” was a disaster, an unintelligible heap of bombast
that was distressing to watch, the way it just refused to end. Life’s too short,
you know?

While not as long and overblown as “Southland Tales,” this third try is just as
bad in its way. And how it treats Frank Langella, who finally got some cinematic
respect with his Academy Award nomination for last year’s “Frost/Nixon,” is
shameful.

“The Box” is like a magician’s prop: It gives the illusion that it’s full of
stuff — ideas, portents, clues, meaning — when actually, it’s as empty as the
heroines’ heads in Diaz’s “Charlie’s Angels” flicks.

Writer-director Kelly adapted this mess from Richard Matheson’s short story
“Button, Button,” previously the basis for an episode of the 1980s TV revival of
“The Twilight Zone.”

With its O. Henry-style gotcha ending, Matheson’s story is perfect for “The
Twilight Zone.” But when Kelly reaches that surprise climax from the short
story, he’s sadly just getting started.

Diaz and Marsden play Norma and Arthur Lewis, a Virginia couple living a decent
life with their young son in 1976. Arthur is a NASA engineer who worked on the
Mars Viking landing, while Norma is a private-school teacher with a bad Southern
accent that comes and goes and a gimpy foot resulting from medical negligence.

Just as some financial setbacks hit the family, ominous stranger Arlington
Steward (Langella, stuck with a horrible facial disfigurement from a lightning
strike), turns up with the box, the button and the deal.

The movie then wallows through superficial soul-searching and sermonizing as the
Lewises make their choice, graduating from a “Twilight Zone” episode to an
installment of “The X-Files” in its post-Mulder death throes, when the show
turned to rot.

Kelly piles on government conspiracies, covert abductions, an epidemic of
nosebleeds, mobs of automatons controlled by forces beyond human comprehension,
quotes from Arthur C. Clarke and Jean-Paul Sartre. And worse still: awful 1970s
plaid pants.

The director and his cast treat all this ridiculousness with such gravity (Diaz
bears an unbecoming scowl through almost the entire movie) that the dam
thankfully bursts and the hammy dialogue and hammier performances provoke laughs
as “The Box” shambles toward its overdue demise.