The Number 23

While yawning through an endless array of trailers preceding the new thriller The Number 23, I casually looked at my watch. The time read 10:23. When I found myself equally bored with the film itself, I checked my watch again—it read 11:23. Earlier, as I crossed the street to the AMC Theater, I spotted a group of five girls attempting to cram into a cab. Worried that they wouldn’t all fit, one of the girls paused and sadly said, “I think we’ll have to go 2 and 3.” There are exactly twenty-three words in that last sentence. Freaked out yet? If not, then don’t bother seeing The Number 23.

This is the most cataclysmically silly film in quite a while. How anyone on the cast and crew could have remotely taken this drivel seriously is beyond me. Its star, Jim Carrey, has taken gambles before—his dramatic work in films like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind paid off.

Yet seeing his zombie-like face laden with scribbled twenty-threes on this film’s poster makes it impossible for Carrey-buffs not to recall his hilarious work in Liar Liar. There he played a lawyer cursed with a truth-telling hex, who rebelled by trying to write that the blue pen he held in his hand was red. Instead, his hand gained a life of its own, and wrote ‘BLUE’ all over his writhing mug. It was a great scene and an impeccable display of physical comedy. The problem with The Number 23 is it treats equally absurd events and behavior with the utmost sincerity.

Carrey is Walter Sparrow, a deceptively simple family man who works for the Department of Animal Control—a job title that can’t help reminding one of a certain Pet Detective. His wife Agatha, played by Virginia Madsen, finds a book entitled The Number 23 at a book store called A Novel Fate. The address number of the store is 599, and for those who don’t have their calculators handy, five plus nine plus nine is twenty-three. Needless to say, subtlety is not one of this film’s strong points.

Anyway, Agatha buys the book for Walter who becomes immediately haunted by the book’s content, and the familiarity of its main character. “You can call me Fingerling,” reads Walter’s ominous voice-over, which sounds startlingly like the Cable Guy. Fingerling’s fictional tale begins to parallel Walter’s life, as the tormented everyman starts sharing the fictional character’s obsession with the doom-laden number twenty-three. The number seems to be pointing Walter toward a profound revelation, which grows more horrifying as Fingerling reveals himself in the text to be a killer.

This bare-bone structure may sound intriguing enough, but overkill-extraordinaire Joel Schumacher directs with the kind of thudding heavy-hand that drowns any shred of mystery or suspense in a vat of laughable ludicrousness. Schumacher makes sure that every conceivable number on-screen adds up to twenty-three. The characters often digress into long-winded debates about how every troubling event in history is branded with the titular numerical phantom. These scenes don’t just coast on the edge of self-parody; they often dive right into the abyss of lunacy.

The Number 23 is the second film in a week where Madsen plays a naïve wife inexplicably devoted to her crackpot of a husband—the other was the superior Astronaut Farmer. Both roles force her to valiantly struggle with dialogue that shouldn’t be wished upon any actor. In Farmer, she throws dishes at her astronaut husband, while tearfully raging, “You want to see flying saucers?!” Here, Madsen actually shrieks, “Look around at all the beautiful twenty-threes! You don’t want to disappoint them do you?!” If Madsen doesn’t get a new agent fast, she’ll find herself starring in I Married Charles Manson, in which she’ll squeal, “I thought you said you were a family man!?”

As in Batman Forever, Schumacher once again refuses to reign in Carrey’s spastic energy. When it’s on full-throttle, Carrey can make Jack Torrance seem subdued. And yet, the actor’s work is solid. Too bad it’s in a doomed movie. While the film’s majority consists of characters describing the muddled plot, the last act unleashes a jaw-dropping explanation so far-fetched it makes Lady in the Water look half-way plausible. The only thing that stayed with me after seeing The Number 23 is the number itself, which has even managed to eerily-infiltrate my own star-rating!

Rating: 2/3* (out of *****)