When Walter Sparrow, a bashful Animal Control officer, happens upon a mysterious book entitled The Number 23, his world view is suddenly turned upside-down.  Every page turned in the ominous-looking novel becomes another parallel to Sparrow’s own life and past experiences.  When Sparrow realizes that the ‘23’ obsession that haunts the book’s protagonist is becoming his own, he must suspend his own disbelief, pacify his worried family, and follow numerically complex and morbid clues to find the answer to the mystery.  Though sporadically intense and marginally intriguing, The Number 23 is just a mishmash of special effects and plot twists surrounding an obsession that never becomes very interesting.

The Number 23 stars Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen and is directed by Joel Schumacher.  Rated R.

First of all, this review will have spoilers.  If you plan to see this film and don’t want to know major plot details, please stop reading now.  Go spend your blissfully ignorant money and come back to refute.

If there’s one thing that comes easily in my weekly film reviews, it has got to be picking out just what makes a film good or bad.  Most of the time, it’s simple – plot inconsistencies, bad dialogue, and less-than-adequate performances are usually glaring.  However, every so often I leave the theater feeling disappointed without knowing exactly why. The Number 23 is one of those instances.  There isn’t anything in particular that plagues the film, no striking flaws on which to lament.  Yet, the discouraging feeling remains in me.  Here and now, I will attempt to undermine my own thick head.   

The big challenge while watching this film, besides overcoming the innate urge to smirk whenever Carrey is on screen, seems to be figuring out where it’s going and why it’s urgent.  The obsession over a two-digit number, while unique, continually feels contrived and under-explained.  I understood completely Sparrow’s obsession – if I were reading a book and finding overwhelming similarity between it and myself, you’d better believe I’d be freaked.  But I needed to know why I should care, why I should be concerned or frightened.  After doing some research, I found that the number 23 has a long history of involvement in paranoia – the Discordian belief that 23 is directly connected to all events and incidents, its association with other unlucky numbers, and its unique position numerically as one that can be easily associated with everyday coincidence.  In the film, the history of the number is briefly touched upon, but never becomes established as anything more than one man’s solitary obsession.  Without a frame of reference, 23 is just a number, and even Jim Carrey can’t convince me otherwise.

If we set aside my own ignorance regarding the number’s history, there still remains a movie that can’t help but get under your skin a bit.  First of all, the screenwriter or the director or both committed an egregious error by allowing half of the movie to be narrated.  I realize the bulk of it is about reading a book, and something so visually boring must be altered.  So, how does one go about making a movie about reading a book without narration?  Well, I’m not totally sure, but it may have involved not making the movie at all.  Let’s be honest – narration is fine in moderation, but when most of the film must be explained by an actor reading lines in a sound booth, we really aren’t getting the full effect or our money’s worth.

Then, after all the narrated buildup, overzealous special effects, and the underwhelming application of intensity, we get the same tired ending to a rash of recent psychological thrillers: It’s all in his mind!  I was considering Secret Window and Identity after watching this film and realized that I hate, beyond all other plot twists, that everything we’ve seen or learned on the screen can be attributed to a crazy person’s sick head.  It is the lowest kind of filmmaker deception and a cop-out.  Of course, I then realized that one of my favorite movies, Fight Club, could be said to end in the same way – Tyler ends up being a figment of the protagonist’s imagination, another personality.  But Fight Club had so much more going for it than a big plot twist.  The audience isn’t confused about what’s happening throughout the entire movie, they just assume that the story is headed in one direction before it becomes something totally different.  When a film is riding on that revealing moment, where everyone gets to understand what the hell the last two convoluted hours were about, it needs to be more believable than some pathetic deus ex machina.

The movie has a few redeeming qualities.  But 2 good actors plus 2 hours of decent writing and slick, eye-catching direction don’t add up to The Number 23, or a very good film.  Wow!  Picking out the flaws wasn’t so hard after all!