starts promising, ends up being completely pointless

Rating: 4/10 (16 April 2012)

this movie is a good example of a fault a lot of newer movies seem to make. since the audience is getting accustomed to plot twists, most plot twists that make any sense at all will be predicted by people and thus not really surprise them. to get a feeling of how much the ability of people to foresee plot twists has changed, just watch the usual suspects. i think most people nowadays would see the ending coming from a mile away, when back when it came out it apparently surprised most people
so in order to make a really surprising plot twist, movies just make plot twists that make no sense at all, and are thus impossible to predict
this is the case with the number 23, which starts up nicely by building up suspense and developing its characters and then follows this up with a plot twist that makes absolutely no sense at all based on anything we ve seen so far. i felt pretty let down when after the first two thirds (23!) the whole plot started going down the toilet.
the acting also gets pretty bad from there, apparently even the actors didn't know how to deal with the sudden complete change of the characters they are portraying
the horrible Hollywood ending seals the deal for this mediocre movie, instead of focussing on the good part (showing the decline into paranoia of a normal person) it tries to be too many things at once and ends up being some garbled garbage