There are some films that confront the viewer with profound ethical dilemmas, agonising moral choices. In this one, an ageing man with a horrible face approaches a happily married woman with a proposition that could earn her $1m. Oh, heavens to Betsy, you are probably thinking, it's that Robert Redford back again, the incorrigible old goat, making another of his indecent proposals: a sackful of cash in exchange for the chance to let his expensive trousers and pants pool round his ankles while he puts you on the receiving end of a one-off rogering. How absolutely loathsome. And yet it is a lot of money, so gosh, would I? Would I?
But it is not Robert Redford. This time it is Frank Langella, playing a man with an appalling wound to the side of his face, dressed in an impeccably suave suit and somewhat jaunty hat. In 1976, he arrives at the home of Cameron Diaz, wife of a Nasa employee – and he has something other than sex on his mind. This impassive and mysterious man has had a strange package delivered to her home: it is a box with a perspex dome on top containing a red button. Langella explains that if she or her husband consents to open the dome and push the button, someone, somewhere in the world will die – someone whom they don't know. In return, they will receive $1m. But he cannot push the button himself, it has to be them, and if they inform the police or anyone else, the deal is off. He politely explains that Cameron and her husband, played by James Marsden, now have 24 hours to think it over.
Oh lordy, what on earth are they going to do? Who is this person? A madman? A government agent? Marsden and Diaz do have financial worries, though, and the man's money is real enough. What harm could it do to humour this wacko and take his cash? This crazy box with the red button couldn't really kill someone ... could it? But what sort of weird Mephistophelean bargain would they be making?
This film, directed by Richard Kelly, is based on the 1970 short story Button, Button by the science-fiction writer Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend); it later became a Twilight Zone television episode. The original story, a little like WW Jacobs's supernatural tale The Monkey's Paw, resolves its intriguing premise with elegant swiftness. But this film just goes interminably on and on, like some pop video to a prog rock track from hell, padding things out to feature length with all sorts of incredible gibberish and extraneous nonsense about the Mars landing and government conspiracies.
In one quite mind-bogglingly pointless and stupid scene, set for some reason in a library, a shimmering lozenge of clear liquid suspended in mid-air is the gateway to a vision of pure bliss.
Marsden enters it, and this block of water winds up hovering over his sleeping wife in bed. Marsden is discharged from it with an almighty deluge, gallons of water sploshing unglamorously everywhere, soaking the fixtures and fittings. Not so much Kubrick's 2001, more It's a Knockout.
After making his tremendous debut with Donnie Darko in 2001, Kelly was launched on a career trajectory which is rapidly losing height. The wildly silly Southland Tales in 2007 was a folie de grandeur that was all folie and no grandeur and this one shows that Kelly is developing a bad case of the M Night Shyamalans – a fatal weakness for freaky-sounding codswallop. I have seen movies without a proper third act, heaven knows, and movies with no second act – but this is a movie without a first act. All it has is that one opening idea, an intriguing premise with nothing to follow.
But I wonder, in any case, if any filmic comparisons offer the real key to this bizarre movie's existence. A sinister man? A box? Which may grant large sums of money? And the man is in league with an unseen power? Surely the film has been inspired by the chilling Noel Edmonds himself, whose career has achieved a kind of Satanic resurrection as the host of Deal Or No Deal – that twinkly bearded enigma, who refers to the studio audience as "pilgrims" and is such a huge fan of self-realisation books which encourage you to get rich simply by asking fate for what you want.
Perhaps Langella himself can now be got up in that goatee and jumper, assume the suzerainty of Crinkly Bottom, summon up the dark presence of Mr Blobby, and impersonate the great magus himself in his denunciations of political correctness and elf'n'safety. Now that would be disturbing.
