A boringly gimmicky "thriller"

Rating: 1/10 (10 April 2007)

The Number 23 is a pretty terrible wreck of a movie, one that fails to accomplish anything it sets out to do. It doesn't even fall into the "so bad it's good" category - most of the time I was disgusted by what I saw on screen. I wasn't laughing. I was too depressed to laugh. Laboring through this movie was more of a chore than a ride; I felt like I was mowing the lawn or taking out the garbage, which is actually the exact place this movie belongs. A trash can.
Jim Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a dogcatcher who is unwittingly drawn into the world of a mysterious novel called "The Number 23," written by the unbelievingly stupid pseudonym "Topsy Kretts." As Sparrow delves increasingly further into the novel, he finds the number 23 everywhere, and an increasingly disturbing similarity to the psychotic main character of the novel.
The film's most obvious flaw is the pathetically gimmicky subject matter. The Number 23 is indeed about The Number 23, but who the heck cares? A relatively exorbitant amount of screen time is devoted to characters spewing out arbitrary math problems that "magically" and "mysteriously" add up to 23. The main characters live at 1814. 18+1+4=23. When Sparrow's wife, Agatha, played by Virginia Madsen, says that it's stupid, the numbers are "cleverly" screwed around with until they add up to 23 again. 1+8+14=23. What about 1+8+1+4=14? How is that important? Or 181+4? Giving you a headache yet? It certainly gave me one. I spent an hour and a half watching people do fuzzy math.
The number gimmick and boring game aside, the movie suffers from a heavy-handed, plot-hole filled, unimaginative story as well. If handled properly, the whole "number 23" thing, though ludicrous in real life, could have worked within the fantasy world of the movie, yet the entire production takes itself too seriously and is too ignorant of its own flaws and failures that the movie collapses in on itself, a black hole reeking of attempted noir, thriller, and horror overtones. None of these work, for the film is neither stylish, thrilling, nor scary. Everything is just boring as we jump from one scene of Walter Sparrow spouting out random and arbitrary math to another of Fingerling, the main character in the book Sparrow reads, listing off endless numbers. It's all pointless. Plot holes are many and obvious too, and the fabricated, ludicrous, and telegraphed ending doesn't even attempt to cover them up. Rather, it just creates a whole bunch of new ones, which make the already extremely tangled up plot even more difficult to unravel. I didn't even try.
We all know Jim Carrey knows how to act dramatically. He's been in The Truman Show, Man on the Moon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and more recently in the relatively disappointing Fun With Dick and Jane. The guy can act, and even though he may be a better comedian than a dramatic thespian, the talent and potential is definitely there. And as ruinous a vehicle as The Number 23 is, Jim Carrey could have made the film even a bit more than the rotting carcass it is. He gives a surprisingly unstable and chaotic performance as he shifts from persona to persona, and he doesn't do it in a good way. You may think, "Well, he should be unstable - he's playing two different psychotic people", but he does it in a pathetically inept and awkward manner. He never seems quite sure which character is which, and he makes the believability of Walter Sparrow as a character almost disappear. Supporting cast members, even the notable Virginia Madsen, doing nothing whatsoever to help the movie. Both Madsen and Carrey are even further crippled the by the canned, predictable, self-important, and laughably awkward dialogue.
So what does a gimmicky premise+a depressingly inconsistent performance from Carrey+a threadbare story full of holes equal? The Number 23. And by the time the movie is over, I'd thought of 97 better ways I could have spent my time. Hmm, wait, maybe that number thing doesn't work after all.