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.