The Number 23
Rating:1/10
Yikes. Everyone already knows this movie is ridiculously awful. I thought Jim Carrey was pretty good in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and am willing to give him a chance when it comes to a non-comedy genre. This movie starts with Carrey’s character, Walter Sparrow, an animal control officer, trying to catch a dog. Displaying great ineptitude, Sparrow is sidetracked by the the name on the dog’s collar. The dog bites him and gets away, which is a shame, because had it not, the resulting baffling chain of events would have never taken place.
Sparrow’s wife Agatha, played by Virginia Madsen, gives him a crappy-looking used book by an unknown author for his birthday. It is called The Number 23. Ta da! All of a sudden, Sparrow starts seeing the number 23 everywhere, kind of like how boys start seeing boobies everywhere when they start puberty. (Speaking of which, Virginia Madsen does provide some nice cleav action in the film.)
Sparrow starts seeing all kinds of parallels to his life while reading the book. Strangely enough, though he finds the book completely engrossing, he takes frickin’ forever to finish it. This gives filmmaker Joel Schumacher plenty of time to show us stylish shots of Carrey playing the role of the book’s main character, Detective Fingerling. While he’s not stumbling into strangely lit rooms wearing tons of eyeliner, Fingerling is having copious amounts of sex with clothed females. It’s really strange and creepy watching Carrey pump into some lady friend of his. This is clearly a case of miscasting.
At some point in these noir-ish scenes, Fingerling picks up a saxophone and that’s sort of when this movie became a comedy for me. It just can longer be taken seriously. I couldn’t help but be reminded of another universally panned film, The Salton Sea with Val Kilmer. Kilmer actually looked cool in that movie and his narration was dead-on. His instrument to express his pain was the trumpet, and he looked ridiculous fake-playing it, but at least the other elements were there. Carrey’s narration stinks. His voice gets annoying very fast, and again, the movie star Carrey with all his silly antics gets in the way.
It is perhaps worth noting that Sparrow has a kid, played by Logan Lerman, sporting what looks like a toupee. Lerman, 15 when this movie came out (1+5=6+15=21 damn!), is actually quite good and went on to play another solid role in a much better movie, 3:10 to Yuma
Buy The Number 23 (Unrated Infinifilm Edition)
