Carrey is Great, This Film is Not
Written: Feb 24 '07 (Updated Feb 24 '07)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Carrey's performance, the film's subject, Schumacher's eye candy
Cons: lackluster script, plot choices that punish smart viewers
The Bottom Line: If you're a fan of smart thrillers, realize that this one is thriller lite.
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| bilavideo's Full Review: The Number 23 |
There's something known as The 23 Enigma. If you're resourceful, you can find a way to find 23 in just about anything.
Each person has 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent.
The earth rotates at an angle of 23 degrees.
The most quoted passage from the Bible is Psalm 23.
The Qur'an was revealed to Muhammad over a period of 23 years.
Michael Jordan's jersey number is 23.
Jesus was reportedly whipped 23 times.
According to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times.
Adolf Hitler's favorite number was 23.
George Armstrong Custer was promoted to general at age 23.
Kurt Cobain was born in 1967 (1+9+6+7=23).
Kurt Cobain died in 1994 (1+9+9+4=23).
The Mayans think the world will end in 2012 (20+1+2=23).
The Book of Revelations has no 23rd chapter.
George Herbert Walker Bush's name has 23 characters.
The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15 (8+15=23).
My own birthday is 9/14 (9+14=23).
I'm obviously the antichrist. Greetings from Hell.
There are people out there who've made a parlor game out of finding references to 23 in everything. There are also some who take this stuff more seriously. The Number 23 is about an everyman named Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) who gets so caught up in the game, he's worried he's going to hurt someone. Sparrow, a local animal-control agent, is acutely morose. To cheer him up, his wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen) buys him a book, a book which happens to be titled "The Number 23." As Sparrow reads the book - a fictional detective story about a character who becomes obsessed with the number 23 - he begins to find uncanny parallels to his own life, parallels that make him fear for his family. As the story's main character murdered his lover, Sparrow worries that his real life may play out in similar fashion.
This is where I depart from the summary of the film and tell you what I think. The Number 23 is an interesting film, engaging up to a point. Unfortunately, its writing is not up to the task of giving us something new. While veteran director Joel Schumacher (Flatliners, Falling Down, Phantom of the Opera) proves he can dazzle us with visuals - at least as well as any film-school wonderchild - he also proves (as he did with Batman Forever) that a film without a script is just a succession of pretty pictures. Screenwriter Fernley Phillips takes an intriguing subject - obsession over the number 23 - and turns it into a somewhat pedestrian, derivative and predictable "thriller" with a surprisingly unfit ending.
Jim Carrey's foray back into darker waters (the public wasn't ready for The Cable Guy) is decent, though Schumacher leaves Carrey dangling, at times, in scenes where either the camera angle or the scene's duration puts Carrey at jeopardy of inviting laughter instead of suspense. Carrey, whose comedy has always included an element of subtextual anarchy and danger, does a great job of playing an everyman caught up in a nightmare. But the film he's in puts him into scenes that sometimes look like stupid setup material for a comedy. If you pay attention to Carrey, you can see where his talent shines, regardless of what Schumacher does to the world around him - but it's not always possible to stay focused on Carrey and ignore the nonsense.
Long before the film revealed its "big revelation" - with a sickening thud - I found myself performing a few "number tasks" of my own. I was counting the number of times this film wanted to redo Memento. In a way, Carrey's previous film, The Majestic (about a guy with memory loss whose new identity is imperiled when old memories - and old issues - come back to haunt him) wanted to do that. But it's as if Carrey hasn't had enough, so he's up for Round 2. The number of Memento references is simply amazing. That includes: the detective story, noirish elements like the good guy and the femme fatale, the importance given to notes, polaroids and tattoos, the search for the unknown writer (not unlike Leonard Shelby's search for "John G"), references to remembered figures (like Sammy Jankis) who may or may not be accurate, as well as the motel room in Hell, the motel clerk who knows more than he's saying, the shapeshifting friend/rival, women manipulating men into roughing them up or killing them, and a few other issues I'd best not reveal here.
In fact, the best defense I can make of The Number 23 - against the charge that this is just Memento Redux - is that Memento may have borrowed from Darren Aronofsky's 1998 film, Pi, which may or may not have influenced 23, a German film about a man obsessing over the number. (Ironically, as Pi and 23 were released the same year, it's unlikely that either film had much of an effect on the other, except that Memento may have been inspired, at least in spirit, on Pi, and Memento's success as a cult film may have eventually found its way in this Americanized rendition of 23.*
It's not that Memento occupies a place in my heart so sacred that other films cannot equally rely upon the same noirish elements that Memento drew upon. It's that this film's attempt to imitate Memento forces it to do things that don't fit either the logic of the story or the best conventions of the thriller genre. What's more, Carrey's need to hedge his bets by preserving his status as a "good guy," even if he finds himself walking through The Shining, is counter-productive. It may well be that Fernley Phillips' original script for this film was tighter and made more sense. For a film about a guy engrossed in a numerological conspiracy theory, I find it awfully easy to suspect that Carrey's star power had its way with the script. If so, that may be why this film lacks seamless coherence. Parts of it feel like a thriller. Parts of it feel like a spinoff of Robert Rodriguez doing Frank Miller's Sin City. Parts of it actually feel like Carrey channeling the "good guy" aspects of his comedy films - but without the comedy.
So, does this movie suck? No, and I think it will play better at the discount theater or on DVD, where expectations are more relaxed. There are movies out there, based on a promising premise, whose execution eventually involves just enough silliness to make it hurt when you use too much of your brain. By comparison, Pi and Memento were films about obsessive loners whose fascination with a single unifying principle made them compelling. Carrey's "family guy" obsesser feels like Walter Mitty on too much caffeine. He's supposed to be drowning in a sea of danger but Schumacher and Fenley give us a story and execution that makes it less likely we'll strike up a conversation, on our way to our vehicles, and more likely we'll simply throw up our hands and head for Taco Bell.
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* It was the existence of the German film, 23, that made it advisable to call this film, The Number 23.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Scary Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot
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Member: Bill Kilpatrick
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