Rating:

Seven was David Fincher’s second studio film, and Blue Velvet was David Lynch’s third—unfortunately, Joel Schumacher’s The Number 23 is far from being the sum of these two parts.

Slick, stylized, and a little pretentious, The Number 23 is precisely what you get when decade-old innovations become big-budget clichés. The 1990’s gave birth to a new cinematic movement in Hollywood called nuvo-noir, a throwback to the dark detective stories from the first half of the 20th century—and with it came a slew of filmmakers who would become cultural juggernauts.

First David Lynch showed us mysteries that chiseled at the illusion of suburban security, in which ambivalence could finally be more engrossing than boring. Then there was Tarantino, whose nostalgia for bygone genres brought us new appreciation for spaghetti westerns, film noir, and blaxploitation. Finally, David Fincher modernized the detective saga, his use of digital photography and special effects somehow bringing a new angle of cerebral intimacy to classical themes centering on unreliable narrators and tragic flaws.

And then there was The Number 23—perhaps so named because it’s the 23rd or so film in the last five years to borrow heavily from these humble innovators, only overemphasizing “twist” endings instead, and letting details like “story” and “characterization” fall by the wayside.

The story concerns a simple but happy dog catcher (Jim Carrey), whose mundane life is thrown into bitter and nervous disarray when he begins reading a book about a man whose life is thrown into bitter and nervous disarray. The culprit? The number 23, which the book’s main character, Detective Fingerling (also Carrey), soon discovers can be seen anywhere, and deciphered from almost any combination of numbers or letters.

Carrey’s Walter Sparrow, the dog catcher, immediately sees small similarities between Fingerling and himself, and then for less believable reasons takes on a fascination with the number as well. And this is the point at which most of the audience stops buying what the script is trying to sell them.

The settled family man in fact bares little resemblance to the lone and hardened detective Fingerling, which he seems to see himself so completely in. This becomes a problem, because his obsession with the vague intersections between the character’s life and his own acts as a catalyst for his more disturbing obsession with the number 23.

I can’t take you much further into the story than this, thanks to the ‘stunning twists and turns’ of the plot—but rest assured, it becomes less and less grounded.

Schumacher takes a lot of his cues from films like Fincher’s Fight Club, from a sliding timeline at the whim of a fairly unreliable narrator to the glossy, dreamlike set pieces and fluid camera motion of the visual narratives in the book.

Carrey plays Sparrow decently, pre-psychosis, but he made this odd decision to change his voice whenever narrating or speaking as Fingerling, and it ended up being more of a distraction than a device for discriminating between the two characters.

Virginia Madsen doesn’t have much of a chance to showcase her talents, as both of her characters are almost exclusively foils for Carrey’s. As Agatha Sparrow she spends all of her time saying what the audience is thinking and displaying her very best “concerned wife face,” and as the sensual Fabrizia she spends her time showing off her cleavage and not talking—unless the sex doesn’t happen to be rough enough.

Ultimately, the story is simply too far-fetched. Although the ending serves decently as a morality tale, the journey the characters take to get there is entirely contrived—we see nothing magical or even identifiable in the number 23, as we did with Fight Club’s unstable narrator, nor do we see anything sinister as in Lynch’s tales of suburban decay.

The characters are too shallow, and the story is scattered—Schumacher seems unable to decide whether he’s telling a story about one man’s consuming obsession or a family’s pleasant and indomitable bond together. As a result, neither storyline—nor any of the characters—seem genuine.

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• Saw IV