The Number 23's Reputation for Being One of the Worst Movies Ever Made Is Well Deserved
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
If you’re anything like me, you look back at 2016 with horror. Holy fuck was that a shitty year. David Bowie shocked the world by dying dramatically in January when fans like myself had no idea that he was even sick.
Prince followed Bowie into the afterlife three months later and in November something godawful happened whose aftershocks will be felt decades, if not centuries from now: Donald J. Trump, a vaguely Fascist reality television buffoon, was elected to the most powerful position in the world.
The years that followed similarly fucking sucked, in no small part because Trump was still in office, doing everything he could to single-handedly make the world a more toxic, hateful and hysterical place.
2017? Awful, awful year.
2018? Also terrible.
2019? Could be worse but still a waking nightmare
But all that was mere preamble to the horror show of 2020. Trump was still in office and Bowie and Prince remained dead while the world confronted the society-transforming danger of COVID 19.
Things went from bad to worse as deaths piled up and our never-ending culture war just got sicker and sadder and uglier. Something VERY good happened in 2020, however: Sleepy Joe “Let’s Go Brandon” Joe Biden was elected president.
The world unfortunately continued to suck. 2021? Not a great year. 2022? Also not a winner.
I held out cautious hope that maybe 2023 wouldn’t be as agonizing as all the years leading up to it. So it pains me to have to inform you that, if the 2007 docudrama The Number 23 is any indication, 2023 will be the single worst year since the beginning of time, narrowly beating out 2016 and 2020.
The Number 23 added something new and idiotic to the history of horror movie villains: a bad guy who wasn’t a slasher or a monster or a man-eating shark but rather a number.
If that sounds like literally the stupidest fucking idea in film history, that’s because it is. Jim Carrey was apparently attracted to the travesty of a script for The Number 23 because he himself is obsessed with the idea that 23 is a sinister numeral that can be connected to pretty much every terrible thing that has ever happened through a series of torturous means.
Being a big 23 guy, Carrey was excited about spreading a nonsensical conspiracy theory to the moviegoing public but he was also undoubtedly excited about the prospect of being paid 23 million dollars to do what is quite possibly the worst work of his career.
Carrey’s nightmare-inducing, child-defiling performance as The Grinch set the bar impossibly high for historically terrible performances but The Number 23 just might clear it.
According to Hollywood lore, Carrey apparently fired his agent during a preview screening of The Number 23. If I were an agent I would have a VERY hard time saying no to the sizable commission on a twenty-three million dollar payday, particularly if its themes appeal to one of the biggest box-office attractions in the world.
But if Carrey’s agent really loved him and cared about him and his career he would have done everything in his power to keep his star client from very aggressively attempting professional suicide through any means necessary.
If I had to chain Carrey to a chair in a basement to physically prevent him from making The Number 23 I would do so for the greater good.
The first time I saw The Number 23 around the time of its release it engendered intense cognitive dissonance. I could not believe that a screenplay so uniquely insulting, so extravagantly idiotic, was not only written but made into a theatrically released movie with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars with one of the top paid movie stars in the world as its lead.
Obviously on a rational level I know that The Number 23 exists, regrettably. Yet my brain could not accept it. That was even more true the second time around, when I wrote about it for My World of Flops.
Knowing the twists and the secrets somehow made an already surreally idiotic experience even worse. I asked the kind patron who commissioned the Virginia Madsen series for this column if I could jump ahead in the timeline in order to warn readers of the dangers of the number 23, and by extension the year 2023, because the masochistic part of my brain was curious as to whether or not The Number 23 could possibly be as bad and insane as I remembered it being.
It’s somehow even worse. The bad decisions begin with making funnyman Jim Carrey, a chuckle merchant synonymous with laughter, tomfoolery and shenanigans, play the inherently comic role of a dog-catcher in a movie that has deluded itself into thinking it’s a harrowing psychological thriller.
That’s like making a movie where Pauly Shore plays a slacker who cleans outhouses for a living, or one where Larry the Cable Guy is a birthday party clown, and using that casting as a springboard for a nightmarish descent into the shadowy depths of paranoia and madness rather than a goofy romp.
Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a dog-catcher introduced trying to catch a stray dog named Ned after sharing a xenophobic anecdote with him that ends with an assertion that people in China eat dogs.
Ned bites the racist asshole. We then learn, through some of the worst narration you will ever hear in your life, that he only got a bad shift on his birthday because he coarsely rejected the dispatcher’s sexual advances at an office Christmas party.
The slatternly, drunken dispatcher dangles a sprig of mistletoe over her overflowing cleavage and beckons, “Why don’t you wag your tail at me in the bitches room?”
A clearly repulsed and married Walter responds witheringly, “I wouldn’t wag my tail in the bitches room with you if you were the last bitch on earth.”
“Why don’t you wag your tail at me in the bitches room?” may be the single worst come on in film history. I get that “Bitches room” is an edgy way to refer to a woman’s bathroom but my brain still can’t quite wrap its head around tail-wagging as a double entendre for heterosexual sex.
The worst, amazingly, is still to come. Walter is late to his birthday dinner so his long-suffering wife Agatha visited a bookstore where she purchases a self-published book called The Number 23 by the mysterious author Topsy Kretts.
Walter responds to the gift by telling his wife that he’d rather not “have some writer fill my head with nonsense. No thank you. I’ll wait for the movie.”
I’ve never thought about books filling people’s heads with nonsense before. That’s equally true when Agatha tells her hubby, “Every time I read a book, it’s like the author stole a part of me that I thought only I know.”
Despite Walter’s protestations, he starts reading The Number 23 and is transfixed by its characters and themes and its uncanny resemblance to his own life. In Walter’s fantasies, he’s tattooed, tough guy protagonist Fingerling, a sexy shamus who loves playing the saxophone and making love to beautiful, dangerous women as much as he loves solving cases.
Carrey narrates the film in what’s supposed to be a gritty rasp redolent of sex and death and danger. Instead, like every other element of the film, the narration wreaks of bad self-parody.
The Number 23 wants us to share Walter’s sick obsession but the idea of a number terrorizing a man who does not understand himself or his own life is mind-bogglingly idiotic at first glance and grows progressively stupider as the film lurches towards a nonsensical yet inevitable endgame.
I’m going to spoil The Number 23 out of disrespect and hatred for the film and its makers. A movie this world-class bad doesn’t deserve to keep its secrets. Walter keeps exploring the evil world of 23 until we learn that he’s the real author of The Number 23.
He wrote it as a veiled confession that he murdered a 23 year old college temptress but couldn’t handle the guilt so he leaped out of a building in a doomed attempt to commit suicide and suffered amnesia in the process. Then a 23-crazed doctor at a mental hospital where Walter was held published the novel out of some strange madness.
The Number 23 is even worse and more preposterous than I remembered but it’s also shockingly boring.
As is almost invariably the case, Madsen is far and away the best thing about The Number 23. Unlike Carrey, she emerges from this fiasco with her dignity intact. She’s a consummate professional who does the best she can with what she has.
If the 23 people are right, we are in for another awful year. I at least take comfort in knowing that no matter how bad things get, they can’t be worse than The Number 23.
FUCK that movie. Fuck it all to hell.
I’m on Subtack now! Check out https://nathanrabin.substack.com/ for my brand spanking new newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas!
Buy the 516 page Sincere Movie Cash-In Edition of The Weird Accordion to Al AND get a free coloring book for just 20 dollars, shipping and taxes included, at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Cynical Movie Cash-in Edition free!
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 12.00, shipping, handling and taxes included, 23 bucks for two books, domestic only at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Y’all know my steez: I make my living largely through Patreon so if you would consider throwing in even a dollar a month over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace