By Steve Biodrowski

This mystery-thriller with fantasy overtones is just weird enough to be intriguing, but it never reaches the critical mass that will explode into pulse-pounding excitement. The goal seems to have been to create a dark, profound thriller, a la David Fincher and/or David Lynch, but the final product remains resolutely lightweight. Twists and turns of the clever scenario maintain interest throughout, but the film is immediately forgettable upon exiting the theatre.

Premise has dog catcher William Sparrow (Carrey) receive a book on his birthday called The Number 23, a hard-boiled mystery about a detective named Fingerling who becomes obsessed with the titular numeral, eventually descending into madness and murder. Sparrow sees parallels with his own life, including numerous seemingly significant appearances of the ominous digits 2 and 3. Though his wife (Madsen) and her friend (Huston) try to convince Sparrow it is all coincidence, he becomes convinced that the privately published book, attributed to "Topsy Krets," an obvious pseudonym, was written by someone who knows him. Search for the author leads to a convicted murderer whose crime matches details in the book, but further twists point a finger closer to home.

The film's highlights are probably the excerpts from the book driving Sparrow mad. At first narrated, the fictional events are soon visualized, with Carrey and Madsen performing dual roles as Detective Fingerling and his lover. With its murky portrait of a detective in a sordid world, the Fingerling material offers director Schumacher a return to 8MM territory, with Carrey replacing Nicolas Cage in the detective role. With de-saturated color suggesting black-and-white, the sequences capture an excellent aura of film noir, and the hard-boiled action outshines most of what happens in the "real" world.

Problem is the film never plumbs the depths to which it aspires. The mystical significance of the number 23 is never convincing or frightening enough to justify Sparrow's descent into paranoia. If anything, the absurdity of the concept, coupled with Carrey's presence, might have been more suitable for a parody of paranoid thrillers.

Carrey is adequate in the man descending into madness, but his against-type casting remains a gimmick at best. As Fingerling, decked out in tattoos, he looks a bit like a poser, but the casting works because of the overall sophomoric tone of the scenes, whose exaggerated downbeat tone intentionally reminds us that we're seeing the product of some anonymous writer's over-heated imagination. Madsen, who gets little to do as the wife, is a better fit than Carrey in the film noir world, making you wish there was more of her as the black-haired seductress.

The script actually does a reasonable job of tying up all the loose threads and explaining the apparent connections between Sparrow and Fingerling, but the attempt at an upbeat ending is completely unconvincing and rather obviously tacked on (even a casual viewer could guess that the original script ended differently, before Hollywood took over).

Also of note: The opening credits, with the camera jumping and skipping over names of cast and crew, mixed in with endless lines of "2323232323232323," are remarkable, creating an edgy sense of anticipation and dread regarding the number, which the film itself seldom achieves.

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