By Joe Pudas
The Daily Cardinal
In the ""Cancelled"" episode of ""South Park,"" aliens kidnap our tyke heroes, leaving Chef and Jeff Goldblum's scientist from ""Independence Day"" to find out where they've been taken. Goldblum figures out that it has something to do with binary code, and the thought process preceding his eureka moment is as follows: ""Wait a minute, butt sex ... butt sex requires a lot of lubrication, right? Lubrication ... lubra, chupacabra, the goat killer of Mexican folklore, folklore ... are stories from the past that are often fictionalized to heighten drama, ... drama student, students at colleges usually have bicycles, ... bike, bia, binary, binary code!""
Now imagine that kind of extrapolation gibberish extended to feature length, with a paranoid Jim Carrey rambling about numbers instead of butt sex and binary code, and you should have an accurate picture of ""The Number 23."" As directed by Joel Schumacher, a director whose resume includes efforts ranging from good (""Falling Down,"" ""The Client"") to bad (""Bad Company,"" ""The Phantom of the Opera"") to ugly (""Batman and Robin""), the thriller sweats bullets to be meta-intriguing, but instead reads like an even crappier ""Secret Window"" with a dash of ""Max Payne"" thrown in for the hell of it. Beware all ye who enter here, unless this is the second or third time you've seen a movie before.
Carrey stars as Walter Sparrow, a wisecracking dogcatcher who gets nabbed on the arm by a mysterious pooch right at end of his shift. Thanks to this incident, Walter is late in picking up his wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen), who occupied herself by finishing a ""really creative"" book called ""The Number 23."" Walter decides to check it out, and discovers that the potboiler's protagonist, a detective named Fingerling, is uneasily similar to himself. The similarities start to dwindle some, but once Fingerling gets himself wrapped up in the ""23 enigma"" on the page, Walter starts nursing the obsession too.
Everything seems to revolve around 23—anniversaries, birthdays, Julius Caesar's stab wounds, the timing of the Hiroshima atomic blast—and faster than you can say ""A Beautiful Mind,"" Walter is running around fiendishly writing on himself.
The high concept employed here is not dead on arrival, however; this scenario is hardly original, but Schumacher had all the elements here to make a passably goofy little exploitation piece. Instead, thanks to the messy narrative fashioned by first-time writer Fernley Phillips, ""The Number 23"" grows tedious almost immediately, spoon-feeding its target demographic with incredibly obvious clues (the book's author's pseudonym is ""Topsy Kretts,"" and it takes Carrey more than two-thirds of the film to realize it sounds like ""Top Secrets"") in between half-baked philosophical ruminations and tiresome red herrings. Nothing about Phillips' amateurish script works, even down to his embarrassing attempts at ""healthy marriage"" repartee between Carrey and Madsen. When a gifted comic actor like Carrey has to noticeably struggle for courtesy laughs, you know your script needs work.
The reenactments of the book's events, with a grittier, tattooed Carrey skulking around town as the tortured private dick, are arguably the most laughable scenes of the film. This is where Schumacher picks up Phillips' slack and brings his own questionable sensibilities to the debacle, crafting a faux-noir tricked out with sweeping CGI shots and tacky overlighting. The resulting look is as gaudy as any image in ""Batman and Robin,"" and Carrey's stilted delivery of Phillips' soft-boiled dialogue only augments its phoniness. Not even Madsen, gamely vamping it up as Fingerling's lover Fabrizia, can help (neither do the barely-R-rated sex scenes, which are as vanilla as kinky sex can get).
In other words, Madsen completely acquits herself, doing what she can with a soggy duel role. The same can't quite be said for Carrey, whose visible discomfort with this lousy material results in what is perhaps the most unfocused, unsatisfying performance of his career. It's incredibly disappointing to see Carrey whore himself for this kind of subpar schlock, especially after he revived his reputation among both critics and audiences in 2004 with two lengthily titled successes, ""Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events"" and ""Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."" If ""Eternal Sunshine"" was his collaboration with Charlie Kaufman, ""The Number 23"" represents Carrey's descent into trite, studio-friendly Donald Kaufman territory (""My genre is thriller. What's yours?""). Once the movie launches into its denouement, rife with logic-defying twists and moronic reversals, you can practically see Donald enthusiastically pitching this ham-fisted drivel for foolish studio executives to lap up and greenlight. The only function ""The Number 23"" serves is to underscore the point Kaufman made in the astonishingly brilliant ""Adaptation"": good movies can and will be made, but their makers must first overcome the tendencies of profit-driven Hollywood, where shit sells like hot cakes.
