). Timothy Hutton had a busy release when eight of his productions were shown in movie theaters and on television, including The Kovak Box, and a year before his popular television series Leverage premiered. Strangely in one of the last scenes of The Kovak Box is remarkably similar to one of the scenes of the first episode of and later in several subsequent episodes of Leverage. Even Hutton's character in The Kovak Box has similar behavioral characteristics as in the more action-oriented and entertaining, mostly light-hearted Leverage series. What seems to go wrong with The Kovak Box is its sense of timing and the slow pace with minimal action that strains the audience's patience. Unlike the action mystery thriller of the hospital criminal thriller 1978 Michael Crichton's Coma or even the nuclear melt down thriller 1979 James Bridges' The China Syndrome, The Kovak Box is sedate and plodding as the plot unfolds and even ultimately seems to have a rather fatalistic depressive tone throughout the movie. Even individual episodes of the writer and mystery sleuth in 1984-1996 televisions' Murder, She Wrote had the intrigue as well as compelling drama mystery that kept the audience coming back. It's really not the fault of Hutton of his performance, it's the direction, writing, and pacing of an decent plot that would have been better transformed into something like an espionage action movie rather than a pedestrian author's mystery adventure.
Review of The Kovak Box
