The Number 23
I’m gong to go ahead and put this out there: If you read this entire review I will ruin the ending of The Number 23. Don’t worry, I’ll warn you again before you get to it, but it’s a terrible movie and I’d actually be doing you a favor if I ruined it. At least that way you wouldn’t plunk down your hard earned money to have your intelligence insulted.
Well off the bat, The Number 23 isn’t about the Number 23 Enigma, it’s actually about the fictional book within the screenplay “The Number 23”. Agatha Sparrow (Virginia Madsen) wanders into a book store while waiting for her husband Walter (Jim Carrey). Inside she finds “The Number 23” and arbitrarily decides to buy it for her husband. The book is about a man who calls himself Fingerling and a murder he commits before killing himself. This plunges the audience into a sort of self indulgence neo-noir secondary story where Walter imagines himself as Fingerling. If Walter isn’t describing what someone will say or do before or after they do it, he’s walking around posing for effect. Like most things Joel Schumacher has his hand in, it’s more about appearance rather than substance. Walter starts to find that there are a lot of similarities between his life and Fingerling’s and starts to wonder if there is some connection between himself, the writer and the number itself. Eventually, the whole number thing is all but dropped as the ravings of crazy people and solving the book’s mysteries are more important.
Stop reading now if you don’t want to know how this thing ends.
It’s bad enough that the film is sort of a silly and there are plot holes a bus could drive through, but here’s the big twist: he has multiple personalities. Well not technically, see Walter is Fingerling. He has been imagining himself committing a murder that he actually committed. He then locked himself in a hotel room, wrote a confession in the form of the book and jumped out the window. Instead of dying he bumped his noggin and lost his memory. Here’s the kicker, after finding the confession and reading it the police and doctors don’t think “Hey maybe this guy committed murder and tried to kill himself out of guilt” they heal him up and put him back out on the street. Sparrow, of course for some reason (don’t ask me why) wrote the final chapter that explains everything on the wall of the hotel room at some point (don’t ask me when). What makes it worse is that not only did we have to watch him imagining himself committing the crimes; once we find out he actually did them we have to watch him actually doing them all over again.
I hate stories where the twist ending is that the character has multiple personalities. It’s simply the laziest, copout I think of. There was a short period of time there where it seemed like every other movie all hinged out it (Identity, Secret Window, Hide and Seek). It’s basically the writing equivalent of a get out of free jail card. Why’s the bad guy doing what he does? ‘Cuz he’s crazy. See how easy that is? There’s no need to develop character or motive.
Look, I’m not even going to get into why the hospital where he stayed was abandoned, yet a box with all the information needed to unravel the mystery was left in Sparrow’s doctor’s office, where it was very conveniently labeled with his name. The whole movie is about creating a look that at a certain point wears completely thin. After that you’re just waiting to find out what the resolution is and when it finally does come, you’ll think “Seriously?” Then, everything will be explained once again to you and everyone will live happily ever after.
The Grade
- Story: D
- Acting: C
- Visuals: C-
- Originality: D
- Enjoyability: D-
- Overall: D-
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