Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen
Yeah, you remember this…the Jim Carrey thriller about a guy
who is haunted by the constant reoccurrence of the number 23. Apt title, huh? It was Carrey's first real "serious" thriller, and for that it got a lot of press when it came out...I strongly suspect it would have been completely ignored if Carrey hadn't been in it. Otherwise this thing is just silly as hell, and full of ridiculous moments for me to make
fun of, so that’s always something to rejoice about. And guess who directed it!
That’s right, Joel Schumacher made this shit. The guy who
gave you bat nipples and the bat credit card made a stupid and terrible movie…I’m
actually not even remotely surprised. Moving along.
It starts off with Jim Carrey in another classic comedic
role…oh, wait, did I say comedic role? I meant serious thriller. So what’s his
first profound, serious act in the film which separates this from his silly
comedic roles in the past? He’s sitting in his truck, sees a dog go by and
makes cat noises at it, which cause the dog to start going berserk…are we SURE
this is a serious movie?!
 |
| Oh yeah, every great drama should start with the hero making cat noises at small dogs. That's a classic way to kick off a stirring serious movie. |
We then see that he’s a dog catcher who takes his job a
little too seriously as he delivers hammy speeches while chasing dogs through
graveyards. I guess you have to get your kicks somehow when you’re a part of
such a grave and serious profession. Wouldn’t want to let the gravity of the
job of DOG CATCHER get to you, right?
OK, OK, so his job is silly…but what about his home life? He’s
married to Virginia Madsen, and you have to give her credit…this is at least a
better movie than either Highlander 2 or Candyman, so she’s moved up in the
world since the early 90s. But given this film’s quality as is, that’s kind of
like saying getting kicked in the shin with a steel toed boot isn’t as bad as
your wife cheating on you with the mailman. Inconsequential and without any
real upsides to the deal either way. Madsen, while the two are out on a date,
finds a moldy old book called “The Number 23,” which she buys for no other
reason other than to advance the story, because God knows they couldn’t figure
out any other way to move this contrived crap forward.
Inexplicably, Carrey starts to read the book too, which
tells the story of a guy named Fingerling who, as a child, found the dead body
of his next door neighbor, and that screwed him up so much he became a
super-cool detective!
 |
| Ooh, look at all that BLACK he's wearing! What a badass! What a tortured soul! |
This whole thing is told in an alternate universe in which
Carrey portrays Fingerling as the text of the novel is narrated over top.
Fingerling goes and meets this suicidal woman who is crazy because she keeps
seeing the number 23 everywhere. Which basically means she looks too far into
everything and draws ridiculous conclusions from meaningless nonsense…wait;
actually that sums up a lot of the first two acts of this movie. She’s played by
Lynn Collins, who is a good actress, if your standards for a good actress
include terrible, unbelievable emoting and lots of over the top screaming.
Different strokes for different folks.
I mean this chick is nuts, man. Here’s some of her brilliant dialogue…
“Pink is my favorite color. You know what pink is? Red, 27.
White, 65. 27, 65, 92. Pink has four letters – 92 divided by 4…TWENTY FUCKING
THREE!”
How about…pick a new favorite color? Just a thought. You
crazy nutball, you. Also, nice acting! You’re about as credible as a 13-year-old
trying out for a middle school production of Mean Girls.
Well, OK. A mental institution production of Mean Girls.
Then we find out that maybe detectives aren’t qualified to
give therapy to suicidal people as the woman throws herself out a window the
moment Fingerling turns his back. Then later on, we see that Fingerling is such
a good detective with such a sane girlfriend that they have sex at the crime
scene! Totally OK!
 |
| Look at those monochrome colors and how evil they both look and how they're having sex at a crime scene...that's edgy stuff, man! Don't mess with these two! |
In real life Carrey says he can really relate to this book.
Really not making a stand-up case for yourself as the sane character who slowly goes crazy, buddy.
As he reads more of the book, he sees that Fingerling drives
his girlfriend into the arms of another man by getting so paranoid about the number
23 that he starts counting her shoes (23 pairs, yo!) while they’re having sex.
And then he’s surprised when she doesn’t want to keep on having sex. Are you
kidding me, movie? Chicks love it when I talk about my paranoid obsessions! Hell,
I remember last week I was hanging out with a girl and told her that I kept
seeing strange visions of men in black taking away people on the street. For
some reason she hasn’t returned any of my calls.
In real life, Carrey gets more and more paranoid about the
number and starts dragging his wife and kid into it. Well, “real life” in the
context of the movie, anyway, because in really
real life the wife would take the kid and just go to a hotel while daddy works
out his lapses in sanity. But here they stick around and humor him. Carrey,
never one to waste an inch of his family’s piteous interest in his insanity,
takes this humor and runs with it, even going so far as to draw his wife and
son into his crazy schemes. Isn’t he just the perfect father? I think so.
 |
| Great familial bonding always means staking out potential serial killers. You guys who just want to go have Thanksgiving dinner with your loved ones are missing out. |
So we get some stupid scenes of the son being all like, “dude,
I’m 15 years old, I believe in stupid conspiracies because I can’t help it at
my age (but once I get to my 30s like you, Dad, I’ll think it’s all totally
retarded)!” They even go to the extent of circling every 23rd word
on every 23rd page of the book, which somehow leads them to this
park where a dead girl is buried. And you know, father and son bonding is at
its best when you’re hunting for buried bodies in the middle of the night.
 |
| "Hey, son, point the flashlight over here!" "Okay Dad, this is some great father-son time we're having here! Totally not scarring me for life!" |
While Carrey and his son are calling the cops, apparently his
wife and this doctor guy come and STEAL THE WHOLE SKELETON OUT OF THE HOLE, and
disappear before Carrey comes back. Did Carrey really wander so far away from
the site where they found the body that he would ENTIRELY MISS TWO PEOPLE
DIGGING IT UP AND DRAGGING IT AWAY? If so, why? And what, his son is so blind
and deaf he didn’t notice it either? Either these two are the STUPIDEST
ASSHOLES IN THE UNIVERSE, or the movie is just a shining example of horrible
writing. I’m currently weighing the two to decide which one is really true…while
I’m doing that, let’s just wrap up the review.
It turns out that Carrey himself committed the murder and
wrote the book The Number 23, and then repressed the murder after some brain
damage and the book was published by his psychologists under a pseudonym (Topsy
Kretts…Top Secrets…yeah, that’s about the level of wit this movie has).
Yup. That’s all there is to it. Totally not ANY stupid plot
holes I need to talk about or elaborate on further with this. I’m done with the
review. Yup. The worst parts of the movie are behind me. I am absolutely,
positively DONE.
….
….
Yup….done…
……
…..
Oh, you didn’t believe that for a second. Alright, where do
I start? Well, let’s just go chronologically through the whole mess, which
tells Carrey’s strange backstory. Basically he saw his father kill himself when
he was a kid, and so Carrey was screwed up. In college he met a hot chick who
liked to be handcuffed to beds and liked her men to threaten her with knives.
Because someone like that is obviously
the picture of stability, Carrey was surprised when she started cheating on
him. I guess he was a total moron. He got obsessed with the number 23 because
of his father’s paranoia in his childhood, which further drove her away.
They apparently met at a hotel, where Carrey strangled her
and then stabbed her a bunch of times, making a big mess – they don’t pay hotel
maids nearly enough, you know? Carrey ran away but then the guy she was
cheating on him with showed up and got arrested for the crime and sentenced to
prison for life just because he touched the knife. Because it’s not like Carrey
would have left ANY fingerprints or identifying marks when he stabbed a woman
in the heat of passion. I mean he didn’t even have time to clean up or
anything! How are the cops this stupid? Even in a Joel Schumacher film I expect
at least some intelligence. They really didn’t even bother to CHECK THE CRIME
SCENE for any indication that, here’s a bright idea, the bloody, violent
stabbing death WASN’T committed by the guy with no blood on him at all and no
signs of having struggled with anyone? Hell, even a Seth Rogen comedy like
Observe and Report had more realistic cops than this! That’s how bad we’ve
gotten!
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| "You have no blood or fingerprints anywhere else on scene, but we're arresting you and putting you away for life without trial, because that's how we do things in Schumacher world! We're the best cops!" |
Oh, but it doesn’t even stop there! The movie goes lower!
After that, apparently Carrey wrote the entire book The Number 23, starting it as a suicide note but then deciding to
hide the last chapter (which contained the actual suicide note and confession)
right before jumping out a window to try and kill himself. What sense does that
make? But he survived anyway and was taken to a mental institution where he
apparently recovered with, very
conveniently, no memory of the horrible murder, the writing of the book or
even of the girl he liked so much at all. Everything else about him was fine –
he just lost the memories of all the bad stuff that had happened in recent
times.
After recovering, he literally bumped into Virginia Madsen’s
character RIGHT AT THE GATES OF THE MENTAL HOSPITAL, after which it is implied
they started their relationship, got married and had kids…
 |
| I just love this...how stupid is it that he meets the future love of his life right as he's walking out of a mental institution? He didn't even make it all the way out the gates yet. |
...so I guess it never
came up why he was at that hospital, or that he had memory loss, or that the
cops would want him for questioning after his ex-girlfriend he didn’t remember
was violently stabbed and murdered? THAT MAKES NO GODDAMN BAT-SHIT SENSE AT
ALL! You just crossed the line movie! You just became completely indefensible!
He just goes and lives a normal life for YEARS afterward without anything
triggering the memories or anyone from his past reminding him of the girl or
his time at the college or anything? Losing your memory isn’t just like taking
a few pieces out of a puzzle, you goddamn movie; it’s more complicated than
that.
The Number 23 is just a big headache of a movie, with little
logic to the story and almost no redeeming factors in any other area either.
Jim Carrey tries, but the script is so bad that he doesn’t seem to know what he’s
doing. Everyone else is just bland, with the exception of the “suicide blonde,”
Lynn Collins, who is just terrible in brand new ways. Nothing is atmospheric or
effectively done at all, and the film as a whole is just a pile of conspiracy
theory shit made by a guy who thought it was a good idea to put George Clooney
as Batman. Does that sound like someone whose advice you’d like to take at all?
 |
| Truly a respectable filmmaker, Mr. Schumacher is! |
The whole "23" thing is so stupid, too, and obviously just the result of really far reaching grasping for straws and paranoia. Every incident of the number can basically be summed up as "coincidence," and all the shit this movie pulls about it is so goofy it's impossible to take seriously. You can take anything and twist it around until it adds or subtracts or multiplies or divides to 23, and anyone who is stupid enough to believe this whole farcical conspiracy...well, this movie is for you guys. Certainly the rest of us don't want it.
To sum up the experience of watching The Number 23…well, just
watch this video:
The images in this review are copyright of...oh my God, are there 23 total characters in all the captions in this review? I'M COMING APARTTTTTTT!!!!
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