The Number 23

Rating: 4/10 (11 April 2007)

I'm of the opinion that the genre 'mystery thriller' is not an easy one to handle for a director. A master of this genre in the not too distant past was M. Night Shyamalan, who showed that you either need a damn good story to make it work ("The Sixth Sense"), or you have to have the feeling for what buttons you have to push when and how ("Signs", "The Village"). A mistake one can easily make, and here I'm coming to Joel Schumacher's "The Number 23", is that you try to cover the lack of enough own ideas by shouting the ones that you have as loud as you can. But in almost all cases this doesn't help, because the audience will notice. So you need really good images to keep people interested. Some of the images in "The Number 23" have a captivating quality, but most of them are just hackneyed in a "We've seen that a 1000 times"-way. Sorry, but showing hundred different ways to get to a result of 23 doesn't make a movie exciting.