Much like its two-word title can sum up the film pretty well, I could submit a review for MTI’s The Box that sums up my feelings towards it in a pair of words.

Remarkably unremarkable.

Of course, that wouldn’t make anyone happy. The reader would feel cheated, the always leathery John Russo would hunt me down to administer a beating most savage (and alas, I would have no coffee to save my ass), and Lawrence would certainly start sending me worse and worse movies until the tide of Polonia-grade cinema drowned me.

All kidding aside, though, The Box deserves better than that. A few times in its 99 minutes I saw a glint of quality occasionally break its head through the seemingly miles-thick layer of unbearable bleakness, heavy-handed allegory, and noirish swagger that coats this film the way that deep shadows lay draped in every corner of the movie’s sets. The movie itself seems trapped inside the titular Box, unable to escape the six walls built from every crime-thriller cliche I’ve seen.

Frank (John Russo) has just been released from a long stint in prison, the consequence of a botched diamond heist. He takes his parole-administered job of dismantling cars at the local junkyard in order to build up a facade of wanting to "go straight." Of course, things are never that way in the movies, and Frank pays a visit to his old buddy Dickerson (Jon Polito), with whom Frank left the pilfered diamonds before he left for prison. Dickerson gives Frank the run-around, then sends two hired goons to kill him. After dispatching the would-be assassins, Frank returns to Dickerson to try and force the money out of him, and Dickerson is shot and killed in the process, leaving Frank without his $200,000.

Frank also meets the plain-yet-pretty waitress Dora (Theresa Russell) at a local diner. He asks her out on a date (the results of which are awkward and completely lacking in chemistry), and gets involved in the seedy underbelly of her life: Dora is a former stripper kept under the thumb of her so-sleazy-he’s-practically-reptilian ex-husband Jake (Steve Railsback). During one of his intensely creepy stalkings of Dora (there’s no way to sugar coat it. Frank’s peeping in her windows for Christ’s sake!), Frank attempts to stop Jake from beating Dora, and in the ensuing scuffle, Jake winds up with two bullets in his back. Now linked with two murders, Frank and Dora have to try and escape their sordid pasts, which they may very well be able to do with the help of the eponymous Box, a clasped strongbox stuffed with cash.

The Box showcases the first-time writing skills of actor John Russo, and his amateurishness shows. His characters are barely more than one-dimensional, spouting kludgy, unbelievable dialogue back and forth while trudging all-too-slowly towards the painfully bleak ending of the film that takes forever to get to, yet is over in a few unsatisfying minutes. His jail-hardened, world-weary shtick as Frank is rather slow, his dialogue uncurling at a snail’s pace in a peculiar imitation of the film’s plot. Jon Polito and Steve Railsback pump up their characters with such sliminess that they practically slither across the screen, and the two corrupt cops at the end of the film (played by Michael Rooker and Jon Snyder) try so hard to be unlikable scum that they ended up making me smile more than scowl. Theresa Russell’s portrayal of Dora is believably frantic (although Russo writing her so male-dependent is an offensive character flaw), and Brad Dourif, as usual, pleases with his 3-packs-a-day grumbling as Frank’s former cellmate Stan.

As I said before though, these few bright spots only occasionally sparkle through the thick sludge of darkness and depression that Russo and director Richard Pepin have drenched their vision of Los Angeles in. As much as I like darker films commandeered by the likes of Alex Proyas or Tim Burton, the darkness of The Box is stifling and flavorless. The world being painted in such a hopeless palette does nothing but depress the viewer for the hundred minutes or so that we’re forced to deal with it. Even subplots supposed to add a glimmer of hope to all the moping , like the supposed "love" between Dora and Frank, prove to be just as hopeless. Their love affair is cold and awkward, seeming less like new love and more like the last gasps of a dying relationship built on the wobbly foundation of a drunken one-night-stand.

Just as weak as the film is MTI’s DVD presentation. The picture, while accurately colored, has a "jittery" appearance as if frames were dropped or swapped. Blacks looked soft and fuzzy, a huge strike against a movie that’s festooned with creeping shadows and nighttime scenes. Audio was available in either Dolby Stereo or 5.1, and the resulting mix was a little better than I expected given the video quality. Surround effects, however, were grossly overused, especially during flashbacks, and the dialogue was rendered almost incomprehensible at times due to poor mixing and mush-mouthed mumbling on the part of most of the cast. Extras are limited to trailers for other MTI releases, and that‘s it, which just adds to the disappointment level of the film. Given the recent nature of the film, you think they could‘ve talked Russo and Pepin into an audio commentary, which could have shed some light on the production or the more questionable decisions made regarding the film.

When it comes down to it, The Box is not a terrible movie, per se, just a bleakly drawn, cliche-ridden experiment that proves that not all actors should write. Once you peel back the wafer-thin layers of hopelessness and despair, you’re left with a hollow film wrapped in swaths of familiarity and "safe writing." Unfortunately, that leaves this Box very empty.