Dir.
Joel Schumacher , US, 2007, 98 mins
Cast: Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Danny Huston
Review by Carol Allen
This is a potentially
interesting mystery thriller with a pseudo occult background.
Carrey plays Walter, a happily married family man, who
works as an animal control officer – no relation
to Ace Ventura. This is one of those roles where Carrey
tries again to prove his credentials as a straight actor
and does not have to pull silly faces. And at first that
character is quite engaging with a nice sense of humour.
Walter's troubles start on his birthday,
when his wife Agatha (Madsen) gives him a novel "The Number 23" written
by one Topsy Kretts (it's a pun – work on it). The
main character in the novel, Fingerling (also played by Carrey)
is a private detective, who is obsessed with the number 23,
which some people believe is connected in some permutation
or other to all incidents and events on earth. In spite of
the numerous (sorry, no pun intended there) examples we're
given in the film, as a theory it frankly doesn't add up,
but as a premise for a spooky movie, it will do. As Walter
gets further and further into the novel, he too becomes obsessed
by the number 23, as he discovers all sorts of parallels
between Fingerling's life and his own. And when Fingerling
in the book is forced by the power of 23 to murder his girlfriend
Fabrizia (also played by Madsen in a brunette wig), Walter
begins to have nightmares that he is about to murder his
wife. Also involved in the story is a bulldog called Ned,
who leads Walter to the grave of a young woman called Laura,
who died on her 23rd birthday. If Walter can find the author
of the book, who he believes is also the killer of Laura,
he may be able to avert further tragedy.
As hokum goes this initially works
rather well, particularly the dramatised book within a
film sequences involving Fingerling, which have a nice
sense of the Film Noir style nightmare. But as the interwoven
stories progress and get frankly sillier and overloaded
with would be significant claptrap, the whole thing becomes
ludicrous with Carrey falling back on looks of gaunt panic
to convey emotion. Madsen does her best with her dual roles,
looking as though she's at least getting a bit of fun out
of playing the vampish fictional Fabrizia and Danny Huston
throws in a bit of solid common sense as the family friend
with whom Agatha may or may not be having an affair. But
the dénouement when it comes is not
only melodramatic and unconvincing, but it also totally blows
all the effort that's gone into attempting to convince us
a of the power of the number 23, making all that hard work
a bit of a waste of time.
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