The Number 23
What do you think about in your free time? Probably lots of different things depending on what’s going on in your life. What about people with pathological obsessions? How do they move through life? This is what’s explored in The Number 23. The film follows animal control officer Walter Sparrow, played by Jim Carrey. Walter leads a normal life until he incidentally comes in contact with an old book titled “The Number 23”. He begins to notice what seems to be many similarities between his life and the book’s protagonist. He also develops a growing obsession with the so-called enigma of the number 23. This enigma is the notion that seemingly everything in life can be related somehow to the number 23. This leads Walter down a dark path as he struggles to find out what’s really going on.
That’s about as exciting as things get. The film is told in a bizarre fashion where scenes from the book (in which Carrey plays the main character) are interspersed throughout the movie. I say bizarre because while every effort is made to depict Walter’s life as very normal and vanilla, the scenes from the book are portrayed in a highly stylistic fashion as if they came from a bad comic book. The bouncing back and forth between the normal and stylized world is done rather poorly.
The lion’s share of the blame for this film belongs with the director, Joel Schumacher. Everyone knows the name because he’s had his hands on so many different projects. His most famous films, St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys, are relics of the 1980’s and there hasn’t really been much noteworthy since then. He practically killed off the Batman franchise with his work on Batman & Robin (even George Clooney called the film “a waste of money“) and reading his credit list is like reading a list of movies I’ve regretted seeing.
The most interesting thing about this film is that Jim Carrey is the star and it isn’t a comedy. No one can know for sure why Carrey wanted to branch out or become involved with this film but it surely is a decision he must regret on some level. Carrey is undoubtedly talented and I can’t help but imagine that he could have picked almost any other project to make his major non-comedic debut and things would have turned out better for him. Now, because of this film, he might not try branching out again. It would be a shame because he has so much potential, but he needs to remember to avoid Schumacher and most of all to avoid the number 23.
