'The Number 23' doesn't quite add up to a thriller

By Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel, Zap2It.com | February 23, 2007

Jim Carrey in 'The Number 23'

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The Number 23

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It was Hitler's favorite number, and on Michael Jordan's jersey.

It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the entire human body. Dec. 23 is called "Lucifer's Day" by some and yet the most famous Psalm is the 23rd.

You see how it begins. If there's a number that lends itself to obsession, it's 23.

That's the thesis of the Jim Carrey thriller The Number 23, about a man who reads a self-published novel about a man who becomes fixated on the number 23. In reading that book, this sad-sack dogcatcher makes his wife (Virginia Madsen), job, son, everything subservient to this obsession, which he is sure will tell him his fate.

Carrey's character, Walter, is so absorbed with the book that he becomes certain that he's the "hero" of the novel, a detective who has flings with a femme fatale (Madsen also). Will Walter or his alter ego, Fingerling, uncover the clues that reveal the future?

The Number 23 plays a bit too much like Memento for Dummies, a movie puzzle filled with near supernatural coincidences. The book seems to predict events in Walter's life. Those coincidences make him fearful, suspicious, until he's paranoid.

But the movie never truly pulls us into Walter's world or Fingerling's. We watch, but we don't invest in Walter's fate. We don't fear for him or anybody else, even when it becomes obvious we should.

Director Joel Schumacher, the ex-costume designer who over-designs everything (Batman & Robin, especially), cooks up dense, dark, lived-in houses and dank city streets (from the novel-within-the-movie). The script doesn't have enough novelty to it to keep attention off the lamps and architecture and dim lighting.

Carrey can do demented, fine. He tosses off the odd laugh line. Madsen, the earth mother of Sideways, has two characters to play and virtually nothing interesting to do with either of them.
The Number 23 is a puzzle that we sit through in order to solve, not a head trip into fear and paranoia. It's a puzzle we can put down, at any time. Interesting, yes, but you kind of hope your thriller will, every now and again, thrill you.