"The Number 23" has been widely criticized for relying too heavily on its premise, but I think it stopped short. When a film decides to take hold of a nutty idea and build the story around it, the creators should have the good sense to dive right in. Here, they play a few games, but make no serious commitment to craziness.
Jim Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, an animal control man (dog catcher) who has few remarkable qualities other than that he makes jokes like Jim Carrey on mute. He loves his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) and son Robin (Logan Lerman), and has no apparent interests of any kind. Not bad for a guy married to Virginia Madsen.
For his birthday (February 3, 2/3, get it?), Agatha buys him a novel called The Number 23. Walter is struck by the similarities between Fingerling (also Carrey), the book’s hero, and himself. Similar upbringings, memories, and even childhood storybooks are recognizable, and soon he has adopted Fingerling’s obsession with the titular number, claiming that pretty much any and every important event in world history can be added, subtracted, divided, multiplied and cooked to 23, assuming you aren’t using a Chinese calendar, of course.
In a serious test of the audience’s suspension of disbelief, it takes days for Walter to plow through the novel, which doesn’t appear that big. Most college students have more than a few nights were hundreds of pages get read for subjects they don’t even care about, much less are captivated by, but never mind. His reading sessions unfold onscreen in a colorfully grim noir fantasy that actually look so cool that I could have sworn that they were filmed for a better movie. When he discovers that Fingerling murders his gothic girlfriend (Madsen again) in a fit of rage, Walter does the logical thing and goes to a psychiatrist.
Wait, wait, my apologies, that’s how I would have written the script; Walter imitates a bunch of thrillers that he has seen on TV and checks into sleazy motel rooms, harasses suspicious old men, visits prisons and loony bins, and takes a shovel in search of buried corpses. Yes, that’ll clam down your psychosis.
The film’s largely bungled components do manage to click together just enough to imbue watchability on a straight-to-video level. Despite taking itself very seriously, it never truly utilizes the premise, and while Walter spits out numbers like a numerology expert, we’re never really sold on the proceedings as a mystical phenomenon worthy of ripping lives to shreds, just as a reason for Carrey to skip shaving for a little while. By the heavily monologued ending, the script has outright cheated so much that it felt like they had cut 23 minutes of necessary plot threads and character development.
Director Joel Schumacher specializes in this sort of picture. Throughout his long career, he has essentially only made mainstream films that range from mediocre (Batman Forever) to good (Phone Booth), and "The Number 23" keeps that track record alive and well. I couldn’t help giggling at some of the dead serious parts where Walter raves like a maniac, but I found nothing inherently hatable about what was unfolding. I do wonder about Carrey, whose career has been stalling as of late. Was this his attempt to demonstrate further elasticity in his acting range, or a serious swipe at a hit? It’s a bigger mystery to me than some stupid theory about numbers.
Just for fun, lets see what happens when I divide 23 by 5, the maximum rating I issue a film; a long stream of digits beginning with .21, which rounded down is zero. Plus 3/3, the date I saw the film, we’ve got 6. I first checked my watch to see how close I was to the film’s end at 1:33, which then brings the score to –1, but then if I add the total number of times which I checked my watch, which is 3, we’ve got:
2 out of 5
