Less than the sum of its parts

Rating: 5/10 (23 January 2008)

A potentially memorable and novel movie sunk by lacklustre direction and misguided casting. Jim Carrey is Walter, perfect father and dog catcher, improbably married to still gorgeous and devoted Virginia Madsen with whom he shares the ideal marriage, the perfect teenage son and a wonderful home. Through a series of bizarre coincidences his wife Agatha is uncontrollably drawn into buying him a mysterious self-published book - The Number 23 - relating the story of an omnipresent force driving its central character to madness by manifesting '23' in all aspects of his life. As Walter immerses himself in it he grows convinced the curse is real and the book his biography, igniting a desperate struggle to contact its author and reveal its mysteries before his family is destroyed.
It's a clever concept, playing on the tension between the numerological book as an inescapable force propelling Walter towards destruction counterbalanced by his equally dangerous obsession with it as his only path to salvation. Regrettably instead of a layered approach we get simple Hollywood clichés: fog machines, nightmare sequences, flashbacks and haunted dogs. The movie never convincingly infuses the supernatural into Walter's world, disjointedly jumping between them whenever the book mystery falters. The number curse ultimately feels like a plot device to rescue the movie's momentum instead of integral to the narrative, another smoke effect eventually discarded in favour of wild coincidence to tie the few plot lines together it bothers to close.
Sinking the film further is Carrey's woeful miscasting in the dual role of loving father and the book's central character, detective Fingerling. A 'father of the year' crown can't overcome that far from warm and empathetic, outside the home he's insincere and sarcastic, typically smirking, a smart ass who enjoys ridiculing elderly strangers walking dogs and verbally abusing medical professionals. The transformation from paternal model to paranoid threat isn't horrifying when Carrey's bipolar dad makes it credible from the start. As 50's lady killer Fingerling he's completely out of his depth. The role targets a menacing goth/noir outsider in black overcoat and black silk shirt, long black hair oiled back, covered in black-ink tattoos and brandishing a saxophone. It hits Woody Allen channelling Marv from Sin City. Fingerling gets significant screen time with no hope of working.
A potential supernatural cult classic, it's soon forgotten.