MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Number 23'


From the Friday. Feb. 23 Oregonian ....




Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is a feckless dogcatcher. For his birthday, his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) gives him a book called The Number 23: A Novel of Obsession by Topsy Kretts.

Walter starts reading. Within a week, he's wrecking his life in ways that make the dad in "Close Encounters" look like a model of restraint.

Walter sees his life mirrored in the book's cheesy detective story -- which director Joel Schumacher shoots as a movie-within-a-movie, in a style that resembles nothing so much as an '80s music video.

Walter becomes a wall-scrawling numerologist. He's beset by murder fantasies. And he embarks on a lunatic quest to find the book's author, solve a murder and cover every single surface he can find with Sharpie-written equations.

So. "The Number 23" (the movie) is a hyperstylized, reality-bending thriller-with-a-twist. This sort of flick is a delicate contraption: Even if your premise is slick, you're in constant danger of crossing some hard-to-define line of belief with your dialogue, plot, performances or photography. And if you cross it, the whole enterprise can turn into an audience-repulsing cartoon.

Unfortunately, "23" crosses that line more than once. In fact, it leaps across it several times.

For starters, the characters are ridiculous. Carrey has proven he can do drama ("Eternal Sunshine," "Man on the Moon"), but he can't make sense of Walter, who's written as a loser, a family man, a nut job and, in the book sequences, a hard-boiled detective with tattoos. You can feel Carrey reining in his manic tendencies, and when they pop out -- watch the pose he strikes when a body plummets to the street in front of him -- the effect is unfortunate.

But what really kills "23" are any number of bad choices that render the movie tone-deaf, sometimes hilariously so.

There's the sheer number of silly coincidences, especially the multiple cameos by a dog named Ned.

There's the explain-it-all narration, delivered by Carrey in a precious tone of voice.

There's the appearance, again, of that same crazy-man's-lair art direction that's plagued every thriller since "Se7en."

There are the silly character names, like "Dr. Sirius Leary."

There's the movie's inability to decide if it's a psychological or supernatural thriller.

And worst of all, there's the way Walter's family just totally and unquestioningly gets on board with his insanity -- up to and including helping him stake out P.O. boxes, visit prisons and even dig for bodies.

At one point, Agatha, by now the most irrationally supportive wife in movie history, tells Walter, "You're the best father a son could ever have!" At the time, Walter is standing in a hotel room covered floor-to-ceiling with his own chicken-scrawls, his fingernails are caked with dirt and his brain is consumed by a number and a crappy book.

'23' doesn't add up (The Oregonian, Feb. 23, 2007)

Permalink


Posted: Sat - February 24, 2007 at 05:37 PM        

|

©