Eye Candy #261 - "The Number 23"

The Number 23: A psychological “thriller” with a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo and very little thrilling going on.  Jim Carrey, playing against type (I.e. he doesn’t get a chance to mug his way through the film), is Walter Sparrow, a dog-catcher, who begins to read a book called “The Number 23”, about a private detective turned murderer whose life eerily shadows Walter‘s.  The detective’s descent into madness is predicated on his obsession with the number 23 and its prevalence in his life and throughout history.  Walter soon is obsessing about the number and its parallels in his own life and determines that the book he thought was fiction is indeed a confession, and he is driven to find out who wrote it.  Slow, visually striking (but it’s mostly self-serving) and a generally unsatisfying ending (in that we’ve seen this kind of story play out before; check out “Memento” to see how a plot like this can be done well), “The Number 23“ is a failure.  The cast for the most part is wasted (for the love of Pete, if you are going to cast Danny Huston, let him do something).  And there is one big over-arching problem of the film - you don’t care about Walter Sparrow, so you don’t care what happens to him and what he finds out.  He’s not attractive, he doesn’t have a sense of humor, he’s just generally not appealing or sympathetic, so when the big “reveal” comes about, you don’t care.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”