Review – The Number 23

This comes across as a grim version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a comparison invited by the film-makers’ decision to make an arty production full of memory-twisting high jinks and cast Jim Carrey in the starring role. This time around he’s a dog catcher who starts reading a novel about a guy whose life was ruined by a lattice of intersections with the title digits. Our hero becomes more and more certain that he’s in the same boat as the hero of the book, and more I can’t really say without giving away too much of the plot. It’s a self-consciously pretty movie, well put-together but in the end not especially interesting. And that’s a shame, because the tie between numerology and craziness could have been exploited to better effect. Mildly amusing