Good not great, but still gives you a little fun idea to play with with some good performances....

Rating: 7/10 (4 March 2007)

Thrillers are tough nowadays...we have seen almost everything and it's pretty common for most main stream thrillers to follow the typical path of the genre and not provide anything spectacularly new to it. I think that's where Shyamalan really took the world by storm because he managed to breath HUGE life into the genre and honestly I saw a little of that style in The Number 23. They even attempted, although a little forcefully and not really successfully to give us that Shyamalan/Sixth Sense ending but somehow fails to be as shocking or surprising. The idea behind The Number 23 is fantastic. A woman comes across a book which she passes onto her husband who seems a little bored with his life and suddenly becomes compulsively obsessed with the number 23 just like the character in the book. He begins to see how the number 23 affects him personally and takes him on a mysterious quest to find the writer and eventually thwart an decades old murder. They manage to captivate with that notion and also manage to show to us how the number 23 is integrated into our life and our science and our religions and mythologies (the whole 23 concept is not new to 'real' literature.) So the film works and the cast is good and they all work together with one particular performance standing out more than others.
I have always known Jim Carrey was versatile. He has done some incredible work far beyond her bizarre face shifting comedy that made him famous. Unfortunately his other ventures haven't been nearly as successful which is too bad because he is good and very convincing in dramatic parts. The Number 23 is no different. He gives an awesome performance that far outshines that of his co-stars and really shows a man that sinks into insanity. I thought his performance rivaled that of similar roles like Nicholson's Shining, or Harrison Ford's What Lies Beneath. I think in time people will appreciate this film and his performance much more. His wife is played by Virginia Madsen who seems to always be a critical favorite. Honestly I've never been a big fan...not that I dislike her performances but always find her a little bland and this was no exception. Next to Carrey's brutally honest and emotional performance she seemed so downplayed and almost boring. They worked well together but she just didn't give much to the plot or story. Logan Lerman plays their son in a small but effective role and most of the time shows more emotion and ability than Madsen does and I'm sure this will do big things for his career. One of the truly great things about some members of the cast are the alternate roles they get to play as the novel plays out in Carrey's mind. Carrey himself plays the mysterious dark detective 'Fingerling', Lynn Collins does a great job playing three different roles in Carrey's fantasy, and Danny Huston plays a small almost unnecessary role but still he does alright.
Overall it just felt like there was a lot that didn't need to be there. They took far too long to explain the ending. I understood after they revealed it in the first five minutes but yet the explanation continued for 15-20 minutes. I didn't mind the very final scenes, I thought it was 'just' and 'a decent ending.' As Carrey's character says himself 'it's not the perfect ending, but it's the right one' and that's very true. I personally would not have it ended in any other way and in some twisted way it's a good, happy ending. No matter how you feel about some of the minor issues with the film or maybe that it's just a little bland for a thriller you will leave the theater adding numbers in your head and thinking about the number 23 and I'm sure that was a big part of the film makers goal. Certainly Joel Schumacher is no stranger to film making both really bad, and really good but he has this way of rushing things and trying to piece together elements of what could be good too quickly. This film does fall victim to that a little bit. It's definitely not bad, and I think well worth seeing but it won't blow you away. It's just an okay movie. 7/10