Conspiracy leery

>> Joel Schumacher fails to fixate with his long, boring thriller Number 23

by MARK SLUTSKY

The late author Robert Anton Wilson, who died last month, would probably be amused by Number 23, the latest thriller from career shlockmeister Joel Schumacher. A goofy, satirical obsession with the number 23 runs through Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, and it predictably inspired a constellation of conspiracy theorizing. German director Hans-Christian Schmid’s 1998 film 23 was about a man possessed by a deadly obsession with the number, and so is the Schumacher film.

But despite the subject matter and star Jim Carrey, this is a uniquely humourless movie. Well, it’s no surprise, considering Schumacher’s pedigree (8mm, Batman and Robin); only he could get away with a movie featuring a trenchcoat-wearing, saxophone-playing private eye played by funnyman Carrey.

Carrey actually plays a double role in the film, as happy dad Walter Sparrow, animal control officer married to loving wife Virginia Madsen (her second “loving wife” role this week; see also The Astronaut Farmer). Madsen buys him a weirdly typeset novel called Number 23 one day and Carrey becomes obsessed with it, reading the events of his own life into the character of cool-guy private dick Fingerling. All the while, we see the events of the book play out with actors from the main story playing their fictional counterparts.

In the novel, and increasingly in “real life,” Carrey’s characters become fascinated with the number, zooming in on historical dates that add up to it, words that kabbalistically contain it if you transpose the letters to numbers and so on. Let me tell you, if you happen to harbour the same obsession, Number 23 is a good way to get rid of it. The characters in this movie literally do not shut up about it for a good 90 minutes of screen time, and the effect is like being stuck next to an aggressively talkative conspiracy theorist at a dinner party.

The mystery itself takes so long to unspool (especially the overly lengthy explanation at the end of the movie) that even the cheesy noir-isms and plot device of a potentially psychic dog aren’t amusing enough to make this watchable. Schumacher’s last, the hilariously over-the-top Phantom of the Opera almost transcended its badness into pure camp kitsch, but Number 23 doesn’t even merit that dubious achievement.

Number 23 this Friday, Feb. 23 (get it?)

>> Movie Listings