Reel Horror

The Number 23 asin: B00005JPLI

I saw The Number 23 opening weekend. I was so excited to see this movie that I went on my own. I am a big Jim Carrey fan and not for his work as a comedic actor- In Living Color's Fire Marshal Bill or Ace Ventura- but for his later, more reflective work, like his roles in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Truman Show. I even liked him in The Majestic. I know The Majestic is not thought of as a great movie, or even a good movie, but I still enjoyed it. Jim Carrey brought an innocent, sweetness to the role that reminded me very much of Jimmy Stewart. Similarily to Jimmy Stewart, you really like Jim Carrey's characters, maybe even trust them. That is how The Number 23 screws you, completely taking advantage of the trusting relationship an audience has with Carrey, that he is such a good guy and will always be the good guy. Don't get me wrong, this was a brilliant move by Schumacher, creating an enjoyable third act that sadly, was a chore to get to. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The movie begins pretty well. I had familiarized myself with the mystery of the number 23 a little bit before I sat down in the theatre, so when the opening credits began to roll with bloodstained type revealing some of the facts that I had read that day, I was intrigued. The opening credits paired with the techno score was really good. It made everyone in the theatre on equal ground with information about the number.

After the credits we open on the date, February 3, and a mild mannered Jim Carrey, or Walter Sparrow, is sitting in his Animal Control van awaiting the end of his shift. In a voice-over, which reveals we are witnessing a flash-back, Walter tells us it's his birthday. Through the next 15 minutes or so, you learn all about Walter's life as a family man; a loving father with a wonderful relationship with his teenage son, with a beautiful wife, played by Virginia Madsen from Sideways, and a job that he adores.It all starts to go a little wonky when he is delayed meeting his wife because of a sad faced dog terrorizing a Chinese Resteraunt. When Walter and Agatha finally meet up in a book store, one dog bite later, she hands him the book she was flipping through, The Number 23. Walter is not much of a reader, but he decides to give it a shot and we finally get to the plot and the narrative device of the movie. We now have two narratives; the real world and the world of the novel. This is where the movie starts to lose it for me.

Besides the Incredibly Shrinking Woman and the Lost Boys, which I really do like, probably for the nostalgia more then anything else, I am not a fan of Joel Schumacher's work. I feel he tends to sacrifice substance for style, and this movie is no exception. The novel begins, as read extremely affectedly by Jim Carrey, "My name is Fingerling." Fingerling is a detective and the tone of the novel is that of a film noir. Schumacher uses this as a launching pad and pumps up that style using an extremely digitally enhanced monochromatic setting with splotches of color here and there, like the color of blood, etc. It was as if Schumacher saw Sin City and tried to use the style but just didn't have the grit to back it up. Despite the subject matter, suicide, obsession and murder, the "novel" portions just seemed too clean. I also couldn't take any of it seriously. The acting, which was farily good in the real world narrative was sub-par in the novel. The "Suicide Blonde" played by Lynn Collins is the first to come to my mind. She is extremely important to the story as she is the one who reveals the mystery of 23, but she only made me laugh, flailing about, delivering her lines like a distraught valley girl on the OC. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was out of her element as a Julliard graduate and Shakespeare actress. Actually ALL of the actors playing dual roles in both story lines seem out of their element. Since it is Sparrow reading the book, Sparrow is the one miscasting all of the characters with the people he knows. Love him to pieces, but Jim Carrey as a badass, tattooed, detective with an attraction to death and a penchant for jazz saxophone just came off as humerous, as did nurturing, Virginia Madsen as a black widow name Fabrizia.

I am knit-picking because the novel portion is only part of the movie. It just seems like we spend way too much time there, mostly because Sparrow is a slow reader, REALLY slow. The book looks as if it's 100 pages tops, and it takes him days to get through it literally driving him obsessively mad in the process. It is interesting that the number isn't truly the reason for Sparrows paranoia, but rather that the person who wrote the book must be someone who knows him on an intimate level as it seems the story was based on his life, all but the fact that he had never killed anyone. This is the true mystery. Who wrote the book, and why in the world does that dog with the comically sad face keep showing up? This marks the third act where the movie finally got interesting, and where as I said before, Schumacher screws you.

Who wrote the book? Was it the crazy man with no address who independently published it? Was it Sparrow's wife's best friend, the professor, who seems to know all about the number? Was it Sparrow's wife? NO! A hundred times no! It was friggin' Sparrow, Jim Carrey! The man you will always trust because of his honest face, and he was so good with his teenage son too.

I have to say, I am usually pretty aware of the smoking guns in movies shooting holes into plots, and I thought about Sparrow being behind it all for a split second, but I tossed it off. No way would loveable, Jim Carrey be able to pull off murder, but he does, and they got me, and they get him in a way that is truly rewarding. It almost made it worth sitting through the rest of the crap to get there, almost.