The Number 23 review

In Jim Carrey's continued quest to keep reinventing himself, he ventures into the dark and murky world of thrillers, but, as the saying states, Wherever you go, there you are. And wherever Carrey is, there's all the baggage that he brings with him. He is a gifted comedian, but he is yet to prove himself convincing in anything requiring an edgier approach. In his defense, it is not all his fault that the garbled and melodramatic The Number 23 fails. Fernley Philips' disjointed script doesn't help, nor does Joel Schumacher's pretentious direction.

All attempts to invoke any genuine chills get lost in the confused plot and dim lighting. It desperately wants to be a smart, noirish psychological thriller, but Schumacher's clichéd smoke and mirrors bravado doesn't mask the ill-conceived and shallow story. A thriller without a thrill is just an 'er' and er? is how this leaves you.

The witches Sabbath falls on the 23rd. George Herbert Walker Bush has 23 letters in his name. Shakespeare died on the 23rd. Coincidence? Not according to Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey), an animal control officer who becomes obsessed with the number 23 after reading the book The Number 23, which his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) finds in a second hand bookstore. To Walter, the parallels between the book's central figure, Fingerling, and himself are too numerous and uncanny to be coincidental.

He starts having nightmares in which he becomes Fingerling, a detective with a nice line in hard-boiled dialogue. Fingerling's seedy world is populated with mysterious women like the Suicide Blonde (Lynn Collins) and Fabrizia (who's actually Sparrow's wife Agatha in a different guise). When the edges between Sparrow's dreams and reality get blurred, he becomes increasingly desperate to find the author of the book, Topsy Kretts (top secret - geddit?), before its murderous denouement.

Carrey plays both the mysterious Fingerling and the increasingly paranoid Sparrow, but neither character offers anything in the way of tangibility. Both are equally hollow and any resemblance to normality exhibited in Sparrow's domestic life with wife and son (Logan Lerman) is purely superficial. As a result it seems to matter little which world Sparrow resides, a factor that should be of paramount importance; were anyone to care. Which I didn't.

Early on, as Sparrow waits in his Animal Control van, he purrs like a cat as a woman and her dog approach. The woman glares at him and turns back the way she'd come. "Sorry, just bored," he apologises. Long before this was over, I felt the same way. Like there's anything significant about the number 23 . . . Hold on, my birthday's on the 23rd. Yikes!

Kevin Murphy