A laughable thriller so out of touch with its own ridiculousness that it serves as a shining example of movie camp. Jim Carrey stars as Walter Sparrow, a dogcatcher whose life begins to unravel when he reads a pulp detective novel called The Number 23. He soon grows paranoid over the parallels between the story and his own life. Walter envisions himself as the book’s hard-boiled anti-hero, and so we get images of a buff, tattooed and sweaty Carrey posing, inexplicably, with a saxophone. You almost wonder if The Number 23 was meant to be some sort of film-noir spoof, but unfortunately Carrey and director Joel Schumacher are deadly serious.
