What’s Your Number? is
a safe, coarse, and standard romantic comedy trying mightily, and mostly succeeding, to
reign in, sand down, and otherwise hide the impressive talent of its lead
actress, Anna Faris. Otherwise, the film would float off into infinitely
stranger and more delightful directions. With her big eyes, plucky physicality,
and total commitment to potentially embarrassing concepts, she’s like a
bodacious blonde second coming of Lucille Ball. There’s little wonder why her
best role is as the lead in 2008’s The
House Bunny, in which she gets to play a fired Playboy bunny who finds
work as a sorority mother. It allows her to match the weirdness of a concept
and then double down on a hugely appealing bobble-headed bizarreness.
Since the R-rated comedy has been abundant and largely
terrible this year, I guess it’s some kind of refreshing that What’s Your Number? is only predictable
and mushy instead of actively ugly or distressing. But Farris isn’t allowed to
elevate the proceedings. The movie doesn’t insult your patience, only your
intelligence and your expectations. It’s all so standard, but at least it’s
kind of briskly laborious in its set up. Faris plays a woman we first meet
getting brushed off by her latest beau. He was her nineteenth lover. Later that
day, on a lonely subway ride after getting fired, she reads a magazine article
that claims women who have been with twenty or more men will not get married.
Since she’s going to her younger sister’s engagement party that night, marriage
is on her mind. She heads out to a bar with her sister (Ari Graynor) and her
gal pals to celebrate and after a night of tipsy talk about her nineteen exes,
she goes home with number twenty.
The next morning, Farris kicks him out and realizes then and
there that the magazine had to be right, so her future husband is one of the
previous twenty. She runs into the man (Chris Evans) who lives across the hall
and is instantly repulsed, although she agrees to help him hide out from his
latest ex, still lingering in his apartment, in exchange for his help tracking
down her many exes. It’s a strained circumstance that forces them together and
it’s all too obvious how this story is going to end. They don’t seem to like
each other very much, but whom are they fooling? They’re attractive, likable
performers who are the two above-the-title leads of the film. How are they not
going to end up together? It’s hardly a spoiler when the movie is practically
spoiling itself.
On the predictable road to the big dramatic race to a
conclusion in which they finally realize that they are just perfect for each
other, we are presented a troupe of mostly recognizable faces as the exes. We
briefly meet Chris Pratt, Mike Vogel, Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg, Thomas
Lennon, and Anthony Mackie. They each get a little potentially funny moment or
two but it usually passes by without the burden of laughter. Mackie gets one
line that made me snicker a little and Pratt has a few as well, but the
structure of the film discourages any real connection with the characters who
are simply personified obstacles for the plot that keeps the two most likable
people apart, denying their true feelings in true rom com fashion.
The relationships and circumstances of the various exes are
ill defined, the central flaw in the picture. It doesn’t help that the
direction of Mark Mylod is merely functional and the script by Gabrielle Allan
and Jennifer Crittenden feels a product of copious compromise. And though she’s
thoroughly restrained by it all, Faris kept me interested. There’s a sense that
at any moment she might break away from the clutches of mediocrity and
surprise. She plays with accents in a fun scene. She slams into physical comedy
with exuberance. She throws herself into the role. But the role, and the film, has
far too little for her to work with. The film’s a pleasant but dull,
predictable missed opportunity, nothing more, and nothing less.
