Numbing Numerology

Reviewed - The Number 23: There are 14 letters in Joel Schumacher's name and nine in Jim Carrey's. Add them and you get 23. Virginia Madsen's name also contains 14 letters and when added to the number in Carrey's name, gives you another 23.

The Dublin press screening of their new movie was held on February 15th, eight days before the film's opening date, and those numbers add up to 23.

These idle thoughts passed through my mind, for want of something better to do while watching The Number 23, which opens today, February 23rd, and is obsessed with numerology, all the way from its opening credits, a mosaic of portentous and exceedingly tenuous 23 references drawn or distorted from history.

Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a gormless dogcatcher, with Madsen as his wife, Agatha, who runs a cake store. On the night of Walter's 32nd birthday, which just happens to be the third day of the second month, Agatha is browsing in a second-hand bookshop where she buys him a dog-eared copy of The Number 23, an illustrated volume subtitled "a novel of obsession by Topsy Kretts".

As Sparrow delves into the novel, he discovers uncanny echoes of his own life in the experiences of the protagonist, a pseudo-noirish detective named Fingerling who is fixated on the number 23. "Spooky, huh?" remarks the Sparrow's teen son, Robin (Logan Lerman).

Sadly, not. Gobbledegook, huh? Sadly, yes, and oodles of it. Fiction, fantasy and reality collide, as they must, in the rambling, pretentious screenplay from debuting writer Fernley Phillips.

The Number 23 is interesting visually, through the contrasting styles so expertly achieved by Matthew Libatique, the imaginative cinematographer of Schumacher's films starring Colin Farrell, Tigerland and Phone Booth, as well as Requiem for a Dream. All that visual style ultimately fails to camouflage the absence of substance in a movie that desperately, hopelessly strives for significance and is sorely lacking in the dramatic tension it struggles to create.

Carrey was irresistibly compelling when he droped his comic mask and played it straight in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, but he's merely manic in The Number 23. In deciding on the obligatory star rating, I opted for the most appropriate equation: 3-2=1.