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If you believe the numeral 23 is cursed, as the brain-trust behind The Number 23 does, why would you name your movie after it? Did they expect something good to come of this?
Sure enough, nothing in this alleged thriller will convince you of the digit's sinister power as much as having to endure Joel Schumacher's artless, overcooked film.
There are limitless examples of how 23 is everywhere you turn: Each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to the DNA of a child; it takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the body; the Mayans believed the world would end on Dec. 23, 2012; the Knights Templar had 23 Grand Masters, etc.
A real-life convert to the mystical might of 23 is star Jim Carrey, again out to earnestly prove there's a soulful actor lurking behind his famed rubber face.
Hopefully he gives up on this before the 23rd bad drama he makes. (Scarier than 23? How about the box-office totals by which he's going to be greeted.)
Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a small-town dog catcher whose life begins to unravel after his wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen) gives him an enigmatic self-published novel entitled The Number 23.
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As he reads it, Walter becomes fascinated with the novel's protagonist, a gumshoe named Fingerling whose existence seems to parallel Walter's own ordinary life. (Portions of the novel itself are dramatized in over-rendered fantasy sequences, with Carrey doing double duty as Fingerling.)
What understandably worries Walter is that the book concludes with Fingerling murdering the woman he loves. Will Agatha suffer the same fate?
Paranoia -- as well as Fingerling's fascination with 23 -- quickly seeps into Walter's consciousness. Eventually, things result in mayhem and meltdowns.
And that's just in the theatre from people wanting out.
Apparently because he had nothing better to do -- or maybe he broke a mirror, or walked under a ladder -- the talented Danny Huston turns up in his patented cad role as a potential suitor of Agatha's, while Logan Lerman plays Walter and Agatha's teenage son.
Yet neither the cast nor the admittedly tantalizing mysteries surrounding the digit 23 -- one wishes screenwriter Fernley Phillips had pared his script down to focus on real-life 23-centred conspiracy theories, rather than clog up the works with his own pseudo-noirish plotting -- are enough to salvage this exercise in fuzzy math.
As anyone who sat through Schumacher's Batman films knows, the director is about as subtle as George Clooney's codpiece, a failing particularly underlined by his inability to manage the film's tone, which veers wildly between comedy and psychological horror.
As for Carrey, try as he might, he simply does not possess the dramatic heft to make Walter's plight as convincing -- or disturbing -- as it should be.
But I'll give the filmmakers this: They had me calculating the instances 23 appears in my own life. Trust me, it helps pass the time until the closing credits.
(This film is rated 14-A)