Rating of
2.5/4
The Number 23 Review
efrain - wrote on 11/15/07
“Sorry dude, we don’t have that.” So says the punk at the concession when I asked him if they had any breakfast cereal. My evening wasn’t going well.
But I was pleasantly surprised that “The Number 23″ was actually halfly good. I know what you’re thinking, halfly isn’t a word. Just wait. There it is. It’s now a word. You’re welcome.
So there’s something called the 23 Enigma which refers to the idea that everything is related to the number 23: from Michael Jordan to the numerological weirdness of 9/11 (9+11+2+0+0+1=23) to the first and last sentence of this review. However, as the movie suggests, there isn’t any meaning or purpose to this weird phenomenon.
At first, I thought the movie was gonna suck because of the director (destroyer of Tim Burton’s Batman movies). And it seemed like a rehash of Secret Window, and I was like ‘dude, Jim, you’re cool, but you’re Depp’. But as it went on, I was like ‘oh wait, never mind’.
In “The Number 23″, Walter (Jim Carrey) is a ho-hum family man and dog-catcher. He’s bored with his job, staring into space, thinking about how cream-of-wheat might taste with carrots. But of course, something out of the ordinary happens. Walter comes across a mysterious book titled The Number 23. He notices the story resembles his own life, and down the rabbit hole we follow the poor fool as he becomes more relentless in his obsession with the number 23 all around him.
See what happens when you read? Walter spirals into paranoia and obsession after he begins reading a book. Moral: Books are evil.
The movie’s only about an hour and a half, but it feels like for-eh-vurr. It drags 2/3 of the way in, so that led me to believe Steven Spielberg is the devil. His movies tend to drag right around the second act. There are normally three acts in a Hollywood movie. 2/3=23. And thusly, we can conclude that Spielberg is the devil. Or at least financing the movie somehow….but I digress.
I liked “The Number 23″. It was interesting, weird, funny, with a few flaws. But hey, not every movie can be “The Little Mermaid”, right? It’s a huge dream, but it’s mine.
