spotlight on Carrey ... and that's it

Rating: 5/10 (14 March 2007)

Joel Schumacher might be one of those run-of-the-mill Hollywood filmmakers on the surface, but his films do express an urge to push that mold just a little bit each time out. He was behind the simple yet intelligent character study "Falling Down", the poorly conceived but sexually dark "8mm", the thriller with an irresistibly limited location "Phone Booth", and the smaller human drama of "Veronica Guerin". Now it's "The Number 23", a stylistic thriller that feels like big Hollywood's delayed response to Christopher Nolan's "Memento". The film stars comedy film regular Jim Carrey in an all too rare against type performance as a family man with a job with animal control. None of those details are really all that important, however. What's important here is that his wife, played by Virginia Madsen, discovers a book in one of those dusty rare and used bookstores, entitled "Number 23". She quickly breezes through the book, but once he picks it up he becomes obsessed by its content, which is seeped in numerology and told through a dark fantasy world full of sex and violence. It's a reasonably interesting film that bridges the contemporary fascination with the likes of numerology with a rather pedestrian storyline that occasionally feels like an attempt at the style of the stronger work of M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense", "Signs"). Due to its thin storyline "The Number 23" is often far more tedious than it is engaging however as proof of Carrey's dramatic talents (even to the point of having an unfamiliar timbre in his voice-over narration) this is a worthy effort.