The Number 23 (R, 2007)

Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a happy-go-lucky animal-control warden (yes, it's impossible to get Ace Ventura: Pet Detective out of your head while watching) whose wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen), gives him a birthday present, a secondhand novel called The Number 23. Walter fixates on the prose, which viewers see acted out -- with Carrey in the role of a tough-guy cop whose lover is into kinky sex at crime scenes and who discovers some sort of conspiracy centered on the numeral 23. Walter is shocked at parallels between the novel and his life, including street addresses, license plates, letters in names, calendar dates, room numbers, etc., all of which add up to 23. What makes it creepier is that the 22-chapter unfinished manuscript predicts that its 23-haunted hero will kill the one he loves.

Attention, comic-book collectors. Somehow a story from an old horror comic escaped, shanghaied some decent actors, clothed itself in fancy computer-aided cinematography, and turned itself into a movie. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of the cool stories that made the comics' covers. It's more like one of the inferior ones in the back, near the bodybuilding and mail-order Venus flytrap ads, dashed off in a hurry to make the publishing deadline.

It's called THE NUMBER 23, and it marks a rare non-comedic (well, not intentionally comedic, anyway) role for actor Jim Carrey. Carrey has done credible drama before (in The Majestic and a few others), but he's really marooned here in pretty hopeless material that might have functioned in print.