Vintage

The Number 23 is a suspense film starring Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, and Danny Huston, directed by Joel Schumacher. This disappointing bomb was released in theaters on February 23, 2007 (wow, pretty neat-o). 

The plot involves an obsession with the 23 Enigma, an esoteric belief that all incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some permutation of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23. This is the second film to pair Schumacher and Carrey, the first being Batman Forever. This is Carrey's first thriller

Jim Carey just does not do it for me as a cool actor and not a cool comedic actor either.  He is a funny as in funny Dumb and Dumber.  I am not saying I don’t like him, but I liked him the best in Dumb and Dumber.  Maybe that is not fair but it took true comedic genius to pull off Dumb and Dumber, the Number 23 was a comedy of sorts, but not of the intentional kind, which is a fatal sin as movies go.  You want them to be laughing at you not with you right? 

The Number 23 is paint by the numbers movie.   I wanted to laugh at it, even though it wanted to scare me with its noir look, shadowy back story, and mood music.  There was even spooky fog as I thoroughly stayed rooted in safely, not once perturbed by the scary possibilities that horror flicks should invoke. I thought of football on my basement’s sofa. 

Even my dog didn’t rustle from its nap as I nearly descended into one.  I suppose I should actually talk about why this movie fell short to justify the insults I just heaped upon it.  In fact, count `em: there was 23 insults in this movie review so far (I just have to go with that theme).  If you bother counting all the insults in this review then it may stand you might like the movie, but I have to play the cards the way they are dealt.  In that that case, if this were a game of black jack, this movie would be a 23 – busted!

Okay, maybe I had a little too much fun beating up this crappy movie.  I guess on some levels the plot was begrudgingly interesting from an occult stand point.  The only reason I say that is because it takes a long time, or at least it seemed to me, for it to build any momentum and by the time momentum came our way, I wish I had rented that movie from Netflix.  Plus, in the course of boring events, Carey becomes a paranoid freak, thinking his wife is torturing him in many odd ways.  His wife and child’s reasons for even being remotely around as the film unfolds him leave one to wonder if they were not the real crazy ones! 

Perhaps I might best explain it this way.  There is this bizarre fascination, supernatural if you will, about the number 23 and how it appears everywhere.  Okay, I guess that is pretty neat and mood changing off the bat, but you can’t hit any home runs with it because it gets old fast. 
Personally, I think the plot may have been stronger without the whole number 23 angle.  Just the fact he was, okay, here is a SPOILER WARNING, a man who forgot about a horrible crime he did in the past would have been enough to carry this movie without all the accounting bull shit.  The movie producers took what should have been one interested fact, something weird about the number 23 and used it to build up the movie, along with other neat and weird happenstance.  They should not have built a movie around this one trick numeral pony. 

I think the marketing people and the movie people had mixed thoughts about what this movie really was: a supernatural thriller or a noir drama.  Because of it tried to do both, it did neither well. 

Were it to have stuck to just one of these areas, I think the movie would have been much stronger. On a scale of 1 to 10, this movie was a 23.

Matthew J. DeReno is manaing editor of CoolFilmz.