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Movie review: “The Number 23”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
“The Number 23” was going for something along the lines of a Stephen King nightmare, but gets tripped up by a character close to a deranged Walter Mitty.
When we first meet Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) he looks like a well-adjusted, competent animal control officer. On closer inspection, he resembles somebody who just got off skid row with paranoid delusions.
Even though his life screams warmth with the gleaming wife, grinning son and glowing home, Walter has a cold edge and dark aura in the story’s opening moments that introduce the dog catcher to a dog named Ned and a tombstone bearing the name of a woman whose murdered body was never found.
Blood makes the first of copious appearances when Ned bites Walter on the arm. When it isn’t actually part of a scene, blood is evoked in the sanguinary hued paint on a living room wall; or, the red-orange tinge of the cover of a dog-eared novel Agatha (Virginia Madsen) picks up at a used book store.
Topsy Kretts’ book is titled, “The Number 23.” And, it’s a page-turner—in slow motion, as Walter works his way though it a chapter a day; from his birthday on 2-3 (23, get it) to 2-10, the day (her 23rd birthday) that the woman with the missing corpse was murdered.
Walter’s absorption in the adventures of the book’s Mickey Spillane-like hero, Fingerling (Carrey), and his kinky lady love (Madsen), Fabrizia, takes a turn from simple identification to unstable obsession with the detective’s fixation with the number 23 and its sinister connection to suicide and murder.
Soon, Walter is catching more evidence in his life of the pervasive presence of the deadly digits than he is wandering animals. Is he finding because he’s looking? Is it evidence of God or the devil? Why does the novel stop at chapter 22, before the story is finished? Is the author a killer?
A wild-eyed Carrey devoid of humor is pretty hard to take about 23 minutes before the red herrings and the twists and turns add up to a total flop. New Line Cinema release rated R for violence, disturbing images, sexuality and language.
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