Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

The Number 23 (2007)

Director: Joel Schumacher

Average user rating

2 reviews

Synopsis

A man’s life crumbles around him when he becomes obsessed with the number 23.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is just your ordinary dog-catcher until his missus (Virginia Madsen) gives him a curious paperback, ‘The Number 23’. As he reads on, it’s like looking inside his head, as the lonely boy protagonist becomes a moody detective, Walter’s own unfulfilled ambition. Soon, however, his fictional alter-ego’s mind-addling obsession with the number 23 leads to kinky sex, suicide and murder. How so? Well, what with birth dates both personal and famous (Shakespeare, Kurt Cobain) totalling the magic numeral, not to mention other ‘coincidences’, the maddening ubiquity of the number pitches the gumshoe right over the edge, setting up the possibility that the same fate lies in store for Walter.

The conceit has a buzz-factor – though the film eschews the most obviously spooky 9+11+2+0+0+1=23 – and an intriguing first half-hour draws us into the so-called ‘23 Enigma’. But turning this into a workable plot is beyond writer Fernley Phillips, as spiralling events tumble into inconsequentiality, and gestures towards moral seriousness prove ill-founded. Schumacher keeps it pacy, the murky camerawork’s very cool, Carrey suitably wide-eyed, but its limitations are finally only too obvious.

Author: Trevor Johnston

Time Out London Issue 1905: February 21-27 2007

Email Tweet Share

User reviews of this film

mr.mike said...

Posted on Jan 26 2008 21:58 Overall , it was.......not very good.

Report as inappropriate
Leona Luk said...

Posted on Jul 25 2007 00:20 If I really liked this film, I would make the effort to incorporate 23 words and/or 23 sentences into this review...but I didn't so I won't.
Poor dog catcher Jim Carrey is given a book and falls deep into its world, however from the viewer's perspective (or at least my perspective) I didn't follow him down the rabbit hole. While interesting, I felt that they could have pulled me harder into this world of the number 23 (ohhh, scary). So once established that I was not following the characters, this made the film that much less interesting from a character perspective, although it was still acceptable from a cinematic perspective. By the end I really did not buy the character motivations, as they seemed more foolish than logical. Big plus for the film was Danny Huston, who always brings life to whatever he is in.

Report as inappropriate