loud, disorderly mess of a movie, "The Number 23" showcases itself as a suspenseful tale with a clever edge but it amounts to nothing more than a high-concept gimmick film about numerology and coincidence.

Written by newcomer Fernley Phillips and directed by Joel Schumacher, the film stars Jim Carrey - in non-comedic mode - as Walter Sparrow, a dog catcher with a tidy, white-picket-fence life with loving wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) and young son Robin (Logan Lerman).

All is seemingly bliss - until Aggie presents Walter with an unusual, self-published novel called "The Number 23" that she found in a used-book store. That book is a disjointed story of a saxophone-playing detective who's faced with mysterious deaths and a strange connection to the number 23.

After being bitten by a dog named Ned, Walter finds the novel overtaking his life; he begins believing that he's detective Fingerling, the hero of the book, and is convinced that he is doomed to commit the same crime as the fictional gumshoe (Fictional character Fingerling goes slowly nuts and ends up murdering his hot-blooded Italian girlfriend) and fears for the safety of his wife and his son.