Post by lordofdance on Mar 16, 2007 21:54:10 GMT -5
At some during The Number 23, I thought to myself, "This is the best Joel Schumacher I've ever seen!" In my case, that translates into something like "This is the best dog shit I ever stepped in", but still, I initially held some hope for this movie. There was just something about it that I found agreeable. Jim Carrey seemed affable enough as an animal control officer, and I was kind of happy to see Virginia Madsen in the movie for some reason, even though I never liked her all that much. I had some sort of unexplainable goodwill toward The Number 23 despite making the decision long ago to hate every Joel Schumacher movie ever made. I didn't end up hating it, exactly, but I sure felt let down about 3/4 of the way into it.
What was it that made me believe The Number 23 could achieve something greater than blinding mediocrity? Let me try to make sense of this. As many already know, The Number 23 is about Jim Carrey reading a book about the number 23 and becoming obsessed with it to the point of madness. What I didn't know was that the story in the book would be portayed on screen as a gothic noir detective mystery with Carrey playing another role as a private eye named Fingerling. The visual style and attitude of the film was much more interesting during these parts. I didn't really find Carrey believable as a dark, tatooed detective, but the whole story within a story idea was intriguing enough for me to ignore his shortcomings. I really though the movie was going to get weirder and darker and perhaps evolve into a chessy classic of some sort. This, however, did not happen. The detective story became dull and the rest of the movie became duller.
Did I mention that a dog that communes with the dead factors into the story as well? But even that doesn't live up to its strangeness. I really thought that The Number 23 was leading to a really disturbing, or at least satisfyingly bizarre, conclusion. Instead, Joel Schumacher drug me back into a commonplace movie with a really disappointing twist ending. The Number 23 degenerates into a film with a moral, of all things. And not one that is philosophically deep or controversial. Why would any studio put up the money for a film like this? Was the story originally much weirder, but the studio made him change it?
I don't know exactly what I wanted this movie to be, but it certainly didn't deliver it. Maybe I just wanted something truly different. Maybe I didn't want Joel Schumacher to fail this time. Perhaps this is the best Joel Schumacher movie I ever saw, but that's not much of an accomplishment.
** out 0f *****
