Numerological thriller puts a lot of ingenuity into ferreting out that combination of digits. It begins on February 3 (i.e., 2/3), flashes back to December 23, points out elsewhere that the numerals in 9/11/2001 add up to twenty-three (you might get fourteen or 2021, but try again), and on and on. A full-blown obsession along these lines gets going when a chance chain of events leads the protagonist to a novel that bears the same name as the movie, a slender, self-published softback in pica type. Reading it, he begins to notice strange parallels between his own life and the plot of the novel, a pastiche of the hard-boiled crime thriller, re-enacted on screen in lurid installments, the protagonist of the movie doubling as the protagonist of the novel, enveloped in desaturated colors, computerized landscapes, every known device of heightening the artificiality. The hero's obsession, aside from any display of bad taste on his part, takes him irreversibly down a path of increasing ridiculousness (he determines the novelist is a real-life murderer and that he himself is the man to bring him to justice), and director Joel Schumacher fails to achieve a sufficiently persuasive tone to cover for it. Not the least of his problems is his lead actor, Jim Carrey, the Plastic Man whose ability to "stretch" himself has proven to be strictly physical. Which is to say, he shows more elasticity in an Ace Ventura comedy than in The Truman Show or The Majestic or Man on the Moon or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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