Okay, so I knew going in that a romantic comedy like What’s Your Number? was going to be a bit tragic. I mean, while I like Anna Faris (as studette Ally) and Chris Evans (as man-whore Colin), I could never really state with a straight face that I consider them serious dramatic actors, so while I had no doubt that they could pull off the screwball aspect that such a comedy entails, I was not going to hold it against them if the more serious (if expected) side was a bit harder to swallow.
And of course, the supporting cast is pretty impressive too. Joel Hale, of Talk Soup and the much under-rated (in NZ anyway) comedy Community, plays a bit of an ass (pardon the pun) and livens things up enormously given his brief screen time, and it is strange to see Zachary Quinto in a contemporary setting, waking up next to a young woman that he has not dismembered with his telekinetic abilities – and indeed, leaving her alive on his departure.
The story runs a lot like the John Cussak classic High Fidelity, with Faris’ leading lady trying to hunt down all her old boyfriends to find the one amongst them, though of course What’s Your Number? has nowhere near that movie’s charm, intelligence or style. Indeed, it took me about 10 minutes to adjust to what I took for college-student style cinematography and then I either became immune or things settled down as the cameraman got used to shooting the fine physiques of Faris, Evans and the other male leads.
For a supposedly risqué movie, there are quite a few safe bets shown. The circle of friends of Ally and her sister contains representatives from all of Earth’s different “races” making it very much a United Colours of Bennetton wedding party, and the way the story evolves is so predictable that one does not even really need to see the movie to know exactly what is going to happen and when. The main characters are unemployed in the poor yet with lots of money, connections and invisible-until-needed friends kind of way so friendly to telling these kinds of quest-ish love stories, and they are trendily cool and hip in a never could get an STD manner too.
Some of the things that work best are the running gag with the apparent stalking of Disgusting Donald and the “themed” flashbacks to boyfriends past; some of the worst are any emotional or drunken scene, and an odd game of strip basketball that takes a long time to go almost nowhere. And I have to say that the film could have done with a bit of temporal trimming.
But overall, I liked it. Sure, it will never win any awards for anything (and it really shouldn’t, honestly), but its likeable enough in its predictable, trying a bit too hard kind of way. It really does feel like a vehicle for Farris as she doesn’t always pull off the character that she is trying to be and I was occasionally wondering who would be better suited to the role, but then she can swear like a trooper and (no offence) pulls off being a bit of a "ho" pretty well.
Verdict: What’s Your Number? was not War and Peace, but it hit most of the (fairly low) standards I had set for it and got the audience (a lot of whom had great difficulty with the concept of allocated seating) laughing on several occasions. There was not a lot of chemistry between the leads, but there was enough to make it enjoyable, even with a final “wrap up” scene that was almost insulting in its intent and execution. An okay 6 $exual partners out of 20.
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