Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Bad things come in 23s

Add the numerals in 9/11/2001 — 9 + 11 + 2 + 1 — and you get 23. Euclid’s geometry has 23 axioms. We each carry 23 chromosomes from each parent. The Hiroshima bomb detonated at 8:15 a.m. Earth’s axis tilts at 23.5 degrees — and 2 + 3 = 5.

That way-cool psalm about not fearing evil as you walk through the valley of darkness? Psalm 23, of course. Oh, and 2 divided by 3 yields .666 — the number of the beast!

Yes, you don’t have to be a paranoid conspiracy nut with a tinfoil chapeau fetish to see director Joel Schumacher’s “The Number 23” — but it wouldn’t hurt.

In truth, there’s something to admire in the way rookie screenwriter Fernley Phillips sticks so maniacally to his one-track convictions — especially when they’re as Fruit Loops as this. To wit: Every major event in the history of the world has some innate link to the number 23.

In fact, as the film goes from merely over-the-top to feeling like it was hatched in some alternate universe, you may wonder whether Phillips isn’t slyly pulling your leg with an intentional parody.

The story begins on Feb. 3 — 2/3, get it? — as we meet Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey), an ordinary, mild-mannered county animal control officer, and his wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen, who also appears in “The Astronaut Farmer”).

Browsing in a secondhand bookstore, Agatha stumbles upon a mystery tale titled, yep, “The Number 23,” a slapdash little tome self-published by its author, one Topsy Kretts, who apparently never published anything else before or since.

Agatha buys the book for Walter, who soon finds within its pages eerie parallels to his own life — all somehow linked to 23.

The tale begins to consume Walter, who suddenly sees the number everywhere and becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery posed in the book’s pages, which come to life in a color-saturated, hyperdramatic story-within-a-story with Carrey as a hard-boiled police detective, Madsen as a va-va-voom femme fatale who likes to play rough and Lynn Collins as an icy “suicide blonde.”

Schumacher gives the film a very cool look — along with the inner mystery sequences, there’s a jaunt through the childhood of the book’s protagonist that’s like viewing a series of animated 3-D postcards. And Carrey acquits himself well in his dual roles.

But the film piles on a preposterous number of nearly impenetrable contrivances — among them a ghostly dog named Ned, a skeleton buried under the “Steps to Heaven,” an abandoned psychiatric institute and, of course, countless references to 23.

The cheesiest touch by far is a too-cute-by-half riff on “Topsy Kretts.” Go ahead — say it three or four times really fast.

By the time the film delivers what is meant to be its big revelatory twist, it has long since frittered away any trace of credibility, turning the twist into a deflated afterthought.

Early on, when Agatha first proposes to buy the book for Walter, he scoffs: “Have some writer fill my head with nonsense? I’ll wait for the movie.” Uh, yeah, so the movie can fill our heads with nonsense instead.

That said, the central conceit of “The Number 23” does exert a weird little pull on the psyche.

As I was leaving the octoplex, it occurred to me that I was born in 1958; I drive a 1992 Honda — with two doors; and in the past month, my wife has told me precisely 23 times not to leave the freakin’ toilet seat up.

Gaaaahhhhhh!

2 stars. Rated R for violence, language and sexuality.

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Jim Carrey faces his fears in numerology thriller