The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)

Well, you could see this coming. Kelly's a director of a few short ideas and no purpose. A Shyamalan without any real hits. Donnie Darko won people over with overloaded crypticism, Southland Tales confirmed there wasn't actually anything behind it, trying badly to compensate with a saturation bombardment of oddness, and now he's just another waste of budget.
It isn't good from the start: cheesy comedy faces given crappy crises that no one could feel for, that you're still meant to believe in. Only cinematography saves it from being hopeless, but that's the last refuge of the scoundrel in modern-day Hollywood. It goes sci-fi after a thrilller phase, and there's no point to the switch. The boxes are ticked in depressingly predictable order: Saw-lite, alien abduction, Twilight Zone, predestiny. You'll probably want to see it yourself just to confirm the utter slavishness to these conventions.

3/10