The Number 23: Movie & DVD Review (2007)

8/07/2007 Posted by Admin

(Originally published Feb. 13, 2007)

Pick a number, any number, though preferably not “The Number 23.”

The latest psychological thriller from director Joel Schumacher is a mess that would love to scare the No. 2 out of you, but forget it. The film is an incomprehensible joke, with Fernley Phillips' cliché-ridden script derailing it, as does the feverish acting by Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen, the latter of whom has yet to make a memorable movie since 2004’s “Sideways.”

The film stars Carrey as dog catcher Walter Sparrow, who becomes obsessed by the number 23 after his wife, Aggie (Madsen), buys him an unpublished book she finds at a used book store.

The book features a detective named Fingerling who sees the number 23 as a curse. Not surprisingly, Walter starts to do the same, likely because weird things start to happen to him and particularly since he and Fingerling have so much in common. Carrey, after all, plays Fingerling in the heavily stylized flashbacks, with a tawdry Madsen tarted up in a black wig to play sluttish Fabrizia, the girlfriend Fingerling murders.

As Walter succumbs to the encroaching madness, one's questions about whether Aggie will suffer the same fate as Fabrizia are put on the fast track when Walter starts dreaming about stabbing her to death. As a concerned Aggie herself notes to the increasingly freaked-out Walter, “You’ve concerned yourself with minutiae and you’ve drawn wild conclusions from them!”

The film follows suit, with Schumacher and Phillips manufacturing every conceivable connection to the number 23. Since the movie finds demonic qualities attached to the number, Charles Manson and Hitler naturally factor into the figure, but so do the Mayans, Shakespeare, Kurt Cobain (!), the Latin alphabet, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, Walter's own past, and countless other connections. What's the significance behind all the hallucinatory hooey the movie courts? Since that leads to a last-minute twist, we'll leave the muddled, unsatisfying results for you.

At this point, it’s safe to say that Jim Carrey has reached a turning point. In some ways, breaking free from the dumb comedies that have defined so much of his career has proved more difficult to do than, say, burying Anna Nicole Smith. But that’s what happens when money is your first consideration, not quality, which the former long has been for Carrey.

On one level, the actor’s difficult transition into more mature roles isn't unlike the challenges facing a child star trying to break into the adult arena. Tough to do, as Carrey has found out. With the right material, he can be very good, as he was in “The Truman Show” and “Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but with the wrong dramatic material--and “The Number 23” is the wrong material, as was the awful “The Majestic”--he tries so hard to connect with crap that the result, not surprisingly, is just that.

Grade: D