“What’s Your Number?” is only exceptional in that it is the worst movie I’ve seen in at least three month (at least since Bad Teacher). In fact, it is a very strong contender for worst movie of the year. Now, longtime readers will ask “But you’ve reviewed Big Momma’s House 3 and Gnomeo and Juliet?” And I would absolutely consider this movie worse than those. The reason is because Gnomeo and Juliet has a bizarrely fascinating premise (although yes, it is terrible and creepy as hell) no one has done before and no one will dare try again, and Big Momma’s House 3 is so joyfully, gleefully terrible it practically soars in its Tyler Perry-gone-very-wrong way. By contrast, “What’s Your Number?” is just shit on top of shit in between a shit sandwich and not only that, the movie is actually dangerous.
I say it’s dangerous because of the fundamental premise that the central character (Anna Faris, who, at this point, probably doesn’t deserve any better) is freaked out by having sex with more than 20 people. The movie goes out of its verrrry old fashioned way to say that not only is having sex with anything close to 20 people slutty (horrendous cliche 1 of a thousand) that it will also make a woman less likely to get married. The movie doesn’t even challenge this ridiculously stupid idea that ALL women are chomping at the bit to get married, ALL women who have sex with anything over ten men are sluts, and that ALL women will have a hard time getting married if they’ve been with 20 guys. So then the lead character decides to track down all of her ex’s to marry one of them so she doesn’t go over this artificially bad number, thus making me think she might be mentally challenged and certainly no more mature than a 12 year old.
What Works: Chris Evans isn’t horrible here as the only guy in the movie she hasn’t already dated AND the one she eventually winds up with. Laughing yet?
What Doesn’t Work: Everything. There’s not one solid joke in this movie but there are a lot that try too hard to be. There’s also no romance (a problem since this is a romantic comedy) and Faris’s courtship with Evans is mostly supplied by pop songs pretending to express emotions. The subplot about Faris’s sister getting married makes it seem as if you can’t make a movie for women without a wedding involved (even the overrated but critically heralded Bridesmaids was guilty of this). And then there’s Faris’s character who isn’t really likable. Romantic comedies think they can slap any screwed up, bone thin white girl in front of us and we’ll love her just because she’s there and young and white and emotionally messy (this is the Katherine Heigl role). At one point, there are two pretty good guys chasing after her and I thought they’d be better off running from her.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Taken this script, ran it threw a paper shredder, burned the fragments, and never spoke of it again. That might seem like a cop-out, but I can’t “fix” a movie that has no right to exist. I call for a script abortion instead of a million little fix-its.