The Number 23
Jim Carrey works very, very hard to generate some chills in “The Number 23,” but all of his wide-eyed efforts don’t add up to much. Carrey suffers due to director Joel Schumacher, with whom he previously worked on “Batman Forever” (1995), playing the Riddler. With “The Number 23, the filmmaker often echoes his 1999 picture “8mm,” the story of a seemingly average guy (Nicolas Cage) swept away by the forbidden allure of extreme sexual and violent images.
In the R-rated psychological thriller, Carrey’s character, Walter Sparrow, is a self-described “bored” government employee who works for the department of animal control (a metaphor for the beast inside him trying to escape) and – like Cage’s character in “8mm” – has a “sex and death” obsession. That drive is fueled by “The Number 23: A Novel of Obsession,” a self-published book with parallels to Sparrow, a repressed man who has no friends and dwells in a very limited world with his wife (Virginia Madsen of “Firewall”) and son (Logan Lerman of “The Butterfly Effect”).
He soon reads the book, which apparently had a printing of just one copy, and initially represents a blessing that excites him and then a curse capable of destroying him and those he loves.
Sparrow develops a sense of paranoia about the events in his life and feels that his mind has started to play tricks on him. He begins to believe that he has a dark personal history, one blocked due to a frozen memory. The questions become whether the man has past sins and, if he does, will he allow them to go unpunished or will he take what he learns from the book and use it to find a path to redemption and, ultimately, happiness?
Due to Schumacher’s overheated approach to the narrative’s themes of identity, “The Number 23” registers as a B-grade imitation of the type of approach truly creative filmmakers such as David Lynch (“Blue Velvet”) or David Cronenberg (“Videodrome”) would have taken to the potentially intriguing material.
It’s difficult to sympathize with the obviously troubled man simply because Schumacher never fully creates his world and transports viewers inside it. Cronenberg or Lynch might have been able to tap into the pitch-black themes of “The Number 23” and inspire Carrey, who deserves credit for struggling to stretch beyond his comic comfort zone, to inhabit a haunted character.
Carrey and Schumacher create a sad soul suffering from extreme and bizarre visions and in need of redemption, but in the end, unfortunately, they make him more wild and crazy than tortured and tragic.
FILM REVIEW
“The Number 23”
Grade: C
Starring: Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen and Logan Lerman; screenplay by Fernley Phillips; produced by Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson; directed by Joel Schumacher.
Running Time: 96 minutes.
Parental Guide: R rating (violence, sex, harsh four-letter profanity, disturbing images)
Web site: number23movie.com