the number 23

This weekend's DVD rental was The Number 23, starring Jim Carrey.

To be brutally frank from the get-go, it was a total waste of the hour-and-a-half it took to watch.

And to be fair it started quite well. Well, I say that - the very opening titles were too reminiscent of Seven, which is a truly brilliant suspense thriller, whereas this is just not.

Anyway, after the credits the beginning of the story works quite well. Carrey's growing obsession with the book he acquires and the number 23 works. You can sort of see where he's coming from and it works on a basic level. Although even here there are some problems - the whole dog issue especially is never really explained or followed up on properly.

Also, the entire plot seems to revolve around a massive co-incidence. I think this was sort of intentional, but it's not really very well solved. There would have been so many better ways of achieving the same effect.

The real problems kicked in about half-way through. These mainly revolved around what I can only describe as plot-holes.

Just as a simple example, Carrey's gets told to take the day off (for medical type reasons) fairly early on and this is where his obsession really starts to grow. Fine, that's okay. But then by two-thirds of the way through he doesn't appear to be going to his job at all. And yet he never calls in sick. And no-one calls him up or pops around to see if he's ill (we're talking friendly small town setting here, I believe). And his wife and son never mention it to him - they mention the obsession but there's no "why the hell aren't you at work?".

As I say, that's just a simple example - some of the plot-holes you could fit an entire motel through (that makes sense as a pun if you've seen the film).

Let's see, what else was wrong?

Well, Carrey's performance wasn't great. I like Jim Carrey as a comic actor - I think he's very funny. He also did a great performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so he can do dramatic. It's just here, I dunno, the pitch was wrong - the character started out quite jolly and as the madness ensued it seemed like he couldn't quite throw that off. I kept expecting him to turn to camera and make a silly face.

But really the biggest problem was the ending of the film.

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that I was expecting one of two things, given it's about "23". Either it would turn out that yes, in fact 23 is an important number or there really was a conspiracy or some explanation that validated it. Or it would turn out that Carrey was totally bonkers.

The actual end was somewhere in between - both were sort of true, and yet at the same time neither was.

This was wholly unsatisfactory on just about every level. It didn't even have the good graces to set us up with some sort of doubt/question or undermine itself. It was just sort of a bit lame.