this was a comedy after all ... oh, it was not??

Rating: 4/10 (6 October 2008)

I love Jim Carrey's work as a comedy actor, but I can understand his wish to play at least once a 'serious' role, to prove that his acting skills are valid in other acting registries. Problem is that unless your name is Tom Hanks or Robin Williams this is not an easy task.
In the case of 'Number 23' there is another problem, at least for people like me who have a very hard time in believing that occult sciences or theories like numerology are anything else than fraud in real life and good pretexts for horror stories in literature or on the big or little screens. Many great thrillers are based on these, among other my number one science fiction series of all times 'X-Files'. What happens there is that the acting style required by such movies needs to be very restrained and controlled in order to have the maximal effect on viewers, in contrast with the terrible things we witness on screen. Restrain is however one of the least skills in Jim Carrey's acting repertoire and this is the principal reason of his failure in this film. His indecision or impossibility of controlling the grimaces we so well know from 'Mask' or 'Ace Ventura' combined with the lack of any day-to-day logic in the story made me at some points hesitate between the options that maybe director Joel Schumacher made some smart parody and all will end with a laugh and the option that this is just a failed thriller with a huge miscasting in the principal role, a miscasting voluntarily assumed. Unfortunately, the later hypothesis is the real one.