Jim Carrey is back in serious thespian mode and with Kevin Bacon's hair. But that's not the worst news about The Number 23, a turgid and largely pointless psychological thriller from hit-and-miss director Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever, Phone Booth).
In what might be charitably taken as a subversive nod to Ace Ventura, Carrey stars an ordinary dog-catcher who fantasizes that he's some sort of tough-guy sleuth (a pet detective, get it?), when he begins to identify a little too closely with the very strange book he's reading. As Carrey's character becomes increasingly obsessed with the book and with its quasi-mystical fixation with the titular numeral, his paranoia grows to Shining-like proportions, a falling-off-the-deep-end that begins almost immediately and leads nowhere particularly interesting.
The movie begins spending more and more time in Carrey's head, a soft-focus fantasy world in which the character's faux-noir alter-ego gets to sport stubble and elaborate tattoos, and have rough sex with a series of women in bad wigs. The fantasy interludes are unintentionally dopey, the descent into madness deadly dull, and the omnipresent voice-over narration that supposedly holds the narrative together is annoyingly overwrought and sometimes flat-out pretentious. It's all terribly muddled and frequently nonsensical in a darkness-for-darkness'-sake Jacob's Ladder sort of way, and the final insult is a tacked-on ending where the movie tries to tie itself up in a neat little bow.
The Number 23 (R) Stars Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston and Lynn Collins. Opens Feb. 23 at local theaters. 2 stars
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2007.
