It's that freakin' 23!

Rating: 8/10 (23 February 2007)

Talk about life imitating art, or art imitating life:
Today, I was on my way home from viewing the new thriller "The Number 23" starring Jim Carrey when I was startled to see that the car in front of me, a BMW 530 Xi, had a license plate ending with the number 4982. Pay particular attention to the 4982, because I did the math (4+9+8+2) and what did I get? 23. Scary, huh? Chalk it up to coincidence, is what I want to say, but still, scary. (Anyone reading this who has a similar experience, feel free to PM me here at IMDb. I'd love to hear similar plights.) Still, talk about art imitating life (or vice versa), which is precisely what happens to Carrey's character is this new film from director Joel Schumacher.
Schumacher's film, for the most part, is smarter than the average Hollywood thriller in a lot of places, but just when things start to get really interesting in the climax, it all falls apart, which isn't to say that up until then "The Number 23" has been a fun and engaging ride. 23, by itself, is a tricky little number with a lot of a bad omens attached to it. For all you conspiracy buffs and numerology experts, I'll leave that to you to decipher. I can just go on the always-reliable Wikipedia for my needs.
Carrey, the comic-turned-Hollywood leading man, isn't all over the place like he usually is in most of his movies. For the most part, he's quite subdued, saving much of his comic grace for early in the picture before the plot unravels, and begins a downward spiral that eventually leads to a mind-bending chase with himself.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. What's all the hoopla about, again? As stated earlier, the number 23 is very tricky. The film starts with Carrey as loving family man Walter Sparrow and his narration informs us that today is his birthday (February 3). He's a dog catcher by trade, and he receives the call to handle the pit-bull that's been terrorizing a Chinese restaurant. The perpetrating mutt, named Ned, gets the upper hand on Walter, bites him on the arm, and runs off. The incident allows him to be late picking up his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) for his own birthday party, who managed to kill time by wandering into a used-book store where she selects a curious little title called "The Number 23," by a now-obscure author named Topsy Kretts.
She buys the book for Walter, who at first isn't impressed by the narrative but as he begins reading deeper and deeper into the book, he finds that the main character, a detective named Fingerling, bears a rather disturbing resemblance to himself. And there is always that annoying little trickster 23, which Walter begins seeing everywhere in his life. His son Robin (Logan Lerman) is also lured into the madness that starts to consume Walter's life, as events spiral out of control and Walter's investigation into the book's narrative and the search for its author yields the gruesome 13-year-old murder of a young woman named Laura Tollins (Rhona Mitra), whose body has never been found, and for which a man may have been wrongfully imprisoned.
Like what was stated earlier, for the most part "The Number 23" appears to be smarter than the average thriller, and its script by Fernley Phillips makes every conceivable attempt to examine the bizarre and ominous nature of the infamous 23, including names, dates, and even the color of the Sparrows' living room wall. But just as things start to really get a grapple-hold on the viewer, it fades into typical Hollywood contrivances and sets us up with multiple suspects and multiple climaxes that ruin what could have been a really unique thriller. And the film's ending narrative happily explains (thus negating the confusion the movie worked so hard to achieve) the mystery surrounding the Tollins murder and Walter's involvement in it.
Carrey is a delight in a change of roles, though the light humor he provides early in the picture is really the only thing resembling his younger days; call it "Ace Ventura"-lite. The movie has other good performances, and the once-tight pace of director Schumacher is ruined by the explanatory ending.
"The Number 23" is probably an example of Hollywood originality ruined by Hollywood itself. Perhaps if the movie had been made independently, we could have had something truly special.
Oh, and that license plate number I told you about? The car made a right turn into a K-Mart parking lot and I never saw it again after that. But I was still looking for 23, just to make sure it was a coincidence. You know what? I think I was right.
8/10