For the most part, seeing Jim Carrey cast his rubber-faced antics to the side in favor of a straightforward dramatic performance tends to guarantee you’re going to get a movie that’s at the very least watchable, with Joel Schumacher’s dismal The Number 23 the exception that proves the rule.
The premise was certainly interesting, with Carrey’s Walter Sparrow falling way too far down the rabbit hole after he discovers a book about the titular digit. Growing increasingly and dangerously obsessed with its contents, things take an even more shocking turn when he discovers the tome is based on his life, forcing him to go to extreme lengths in order to ensure he doesn’t replicate the ending.
Schumacher’s reputation may have been tainted forever by Batman & Robin, but he’d recently knocked out a couple of gems in Tigerland and Phone Booth prior to The Number 23‘s 2007 release, while Carrey’s underrated dramatic chops had won him plenty of recognition in the years previously.
Unfortunately, neither the director nor star was at the top of their game, yielding an abhorrent Rotten Tomatoes score of just seven percent. A $78 million haul did ensure it was a minor commercial success story, but it would rank as the single worst-reviewed film of Carrey’s entire career were it not for the thankfully forgotten Dark Crimes.
And yet, The Number 23 has been crunching the numbers on Reddit, and has come up with a surprising level of support. There’s quite a few folks calling it a guilty pleasure, which is about all it deserves to be branded due to its indisputable status as a fatally-flawed misfire.
