What were they thinking? That's the question I kept on asking myself while watching The Number 23. What was star Jim Carrey thinking when he thought he could carry a psychological thriller? What was first-time screenwriter Fernley Phillips thinking when he wrote this? Did no one involved with this project stop director Joel Schumacher (The Phantom of the Opera) and tell him the script didn't make a lick of sense? Apparently not, because The Number 23 is now playing at a theater near you. This sorry excuse for a thriller (which, truth be told, isn't very thrilling to start with) is an exercise in concept over execution and style over substance. We have some good ideas and some good images thanks to cinematographer Matthew Libatique (The Fountain), but nothing on the script or storytelling level to back them up. All this movie gives us is a horribly miscast Jim Carrey trying way too hard to convince us his character is nuts, and not much else.

When animal control officer Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is given a ratty old self-published book called "The Number 23" by his wife (Virginia Madsen, in her second bland supportive wife role in one weekend) for his birthday, how could he possibly realize the effect it would have on him? The book itself is a murder story about a detective named Fingerling who slowly is driven to madness by the number 23, and how it can be related to different historic and tragic dates as well as other aspects in everyday life. As he reads, Walter finds the character of Fingerling shares a vast number of similarities to his own life, and before too long, truth begins to mimic fiction as Walter becomes obsessed with finding the number 23 in just about everything. He begins to have terrifying nightmares and visions of murder, just like the character in the book. As his grip on reality and sanity weakens, Walter's only choice is to try to find out the real identity behind the author's pen name (The book is credited to someone named "Topsy Kretts", and if you don't get the joke, try saying the name slowly.) and find out just how the book's writer knows so much about him and how he can stop the tragic events in the story from happening to him in real life.

I realize I've just made the movie sound a lot simpler than it really is. That's because there's really not a whole lot for us to grasp while watching The Number 23. Director Joel Schumacher tries to trick us into thinking the movie has substance with a clever "movie within a movie" format. Whenever the character of Walter reads the book, the film switches to a noir crime drama with Carrey playing the role of the tortured detective, and Madsen playing his doomed lover. This is supposed to help strengthen the whole "reality mirroring fiction" theme, but really, it never actually goes anywhere. Aside from how beautifully shot some of the sequences are, the scenes related to the book itself don't really add up to much, and seem to exist simply to distract us from the fact that there's not much going on in the film's actual storyline. Most of the central story centers on the character of Walter reading, being haunted by a mysterious dog who keeps on popping up in strange places and leading him to a cemetery and a certain grave for reasons we don't find out until late in the film, and slowly going crazy as he becomes obsessed with the number 23, and how it relates to different dates and even people's names. Most of Walter's scenes boil down to him running around, his eyes bugged out, as he scribbles different equations and formulas on the walls and even his arms, all equaling 23. Then his teenage son gets in on the act, and the two start trying to dig for the truth. Most of these scenes don't make a lot of sense, and simply leave us feeling frustrated as we wait for the answers to be revealed. And when the answers finally are shown to us, we have to sit through almost a half hour of explanation, as if the movie has decided it's toyed with us long enough, now it's going to over-explain every little detail.

The movie is rich in atmosphere, but honestly can't think of a single thing to do with them. Murder stories mimicking real life, abandoned insane asylums that hold secrets of the past (located in conveniently located files for the characters to stumble on with little difficulty), digging up hidden graves hoping to find clues...This is all worn material to be sure, but it could still work with the right approach. The screenplay is such a jumbled mess that it can't even generate the slightest bit of tension, let alone think of a reason for us to care. The characters are so poorly developed that we find ourselves wondering what they see in each other. Why does Walter's wife seem so calm and understanding around him when he starts going crazy? Why does the old man they corner in the shipping office kill himself with a knife when they confront him with the book? Why is Walter's son so willing and eager to go along with his dad's madness and agree to go along for the ride, not seeming to care that pop is acting a little too obsessed? All good questions, none of them answered to any degree of satisfaction in the film's half-baked screenplay. The movie just keeps on chugging away, pretending that its interesting and mind-bending, while we're left wondering just who the filmmakers thought they were fooling when they made this. The film's many red herrings and twists have no effect on us, because there's nothing for us to care about in the first place.

I have often admired Jim Carrey's dramatic efforts in films like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In The Number 23, he almost seems to be lost and a bit confused. When his character (or characters) start to dip into madness, he can't help mugging for the camera a little, bringing forth some unintentional laughs from the audience. He's not exactly bad otherwise, but he never truly convinces or gets to create a memorable character. Both his Walter and his Fingerling characters are just hollow shells that could have been filled by any actor. Carrey brings nothing to either role that any other semi-talented actor could bring. Virginia Madsen is rather nondescript as his wife, as is Logan Lerman as his teenaged son. The script simply casts them adrift in a pair of thankless roles that they cannot breathe any life into. That seems to be a common problem for every character who enters the film. It's as if when Phillips was writing the script, he wrote down the most basic aspects then stopped there. Maybe he thought the cleverness of the story would pull him through. Too bad the plot and the storytelling isn't quite as smart as he thinks it is.
The Number 23 is a dumb and annoying psychological thriller that manages to be neither psychological or thrilling. It simply wastes our time, and when it's over, we feel a little angrier and a little more depressed because of it. It's strange that the character of Walter spends most of the film adding everything up, when nothing in the movie itself manages to add up to much of anything. We're not excited, we're not engaged, and we're left to simply wait for the answers to come so we can go home and put the movie behind us. The movie doesn't seem to want to do anything but waste a perfectly good premise. If that was the intention all along, then I congratulate the filmmakers. Call me old fashioned for wanting something more.

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