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