It didn’t take long to figure out What’s Your Number? wasn’t going to be my cup of tea. The film opens with an annoying pop song and a credit sequence imposed over images of trashy women’s magazine articles. That’s fine though, a movie doesn’t necessarily have to be right in my wheelhouse to be enjoyable. You could put out the glossiest, pinkest, girliest movie in history, and if you make it well I’ll appreciate it just as much as anything else. I always go into a movie that I’m not particularly looking forward to hoping for it to prove me wrong and turn me onto something new. Unfortunately, What’s Your Number? isn’t the sort of movie that’s going to surprise anybody. Far from it. As a matter of fact, the only thing surprising about this movie is that it somehow manages to be way worse than even I was expecting. For someone who looks at going to the next formulaic, insulting rom-com the same way he looks at a trip to the dentist, that’s really saying something.
The story is pretty contrived and gimmicky, not to mention morally confused. Ally Darling (Anna Faris) reads in a magazine article that women who have more than twenty sexual partners in their life aren’t very likely to ever wed. Unfortunately for her, she’s got twenty under her belt already, so she has to somehow figure out a way to find a husband without sleeping with anybody else. What’s a girl to do when faced with such an irrational and self-imposed dilemma? Ally’s idea is to go through her previous list of conquests and find one who has done enough self-improvement over the years to now be husband material. The only problem is, how is she going to find all of these former lovers? She’s just a girl, so she doesn’t know how to Google people’s names or anything. Luckily the built stud who lives in the apartment across the hall (Chris Evans) is an expert Googler. She asks him to help out, even though she thinks he’s a total pig that she would never, ever consider associating with otherwise, and he agrees. At first they chafe against each other when “forced” to work together, but eventually they end up making a pretty good team. I bet you can’t guess who she ends up with at the end of the movie!
Aside from not having an original idea anywhere in it’s hour and forty-six minute runtime, the biggest reason What’s Your Number? is a miserable chore to sit through is that it is oppressively, forcefully unfunny. Guys in fat suits wanting to go get food, guys who have been digging around in their butts giving people handshakes, this is the highest the film shoots when it comes to getting laughs. The entire film is filled with banter about blow jobs, hand jobs, 69ing, vaginas, and what have you; none of it remotely clever. The screenwriters have seemed to mistake crudity for humor, and the entire film subsequently feels awkwardly desperate to shock laughs out of the audience. They’ve scraped the bottom of the hilarity barrel and come up empty handed. That you can trot out comedic actors like Joel McHale, Martin Freeman, Chris Pratt, Thomas Lennon, Andy Samberg, and Aziz Ansari in assembly line fashion and not generate so much as a single chuckle is a true feat. I almost want to commend the makers of this movie for failing so thoroughly.
Anna Faris was a decent choice for the lead, theoretically. She’s game for comedy. I wouldn’t go quite as far as to call her funny, but she’s willing to go for it and make herself look silly to make a joke work. When given funny gags, she pulls them off well. But here, when she’s given nothing but crap, she isn’t able to elevate the material whatsoever. Also, I don’t understand how someone so free of pretension in her comedy could be so clearly self-conscious when it comes to her appearance. What is up with all of the plastic surgery this girl has had? It’s pretty tacky to bring up someone’s looks in a review, but she has porn starred herself out to the point that she can no longer resonate with me as a lovable, girl next door protagonist. Every second she’s on screen I’m just staring at her lips wondering what happened to them, looking at her boobs and wondering how hard they are. In trying to make herself more conventionally attractive Faris and her surgeons have just made her harder to cast, and that’s a shame.
That’s not the only shame going on in this movie though. The way it exploits Faris’ recent change in looks is a shame as well. This movie has more side boob and butt crack than anything else I’ve ever seen, and it comes off as really cheap and tacky. The attempts at showing off Faris and Evans’ bodies are so transparent and awkward that they just made me uncomfortable. In an exploitation film, where these two were just used as eye candy, it wouldn’t have mattered. But in a romantic comedy, where we’re supposed to relate to and care about the protagonists, all of the near nudity was a gigantic misstep. There’s a scene where they play basketball in their underwear that was one of the most degrading sequences I’ve ever seen actors in a mainstream film take part in. It made me feel like I needed to take a shower, just like the dozen or so unnecessary showers Faris takes over the course of this movie.
Chris Evans I found to just be miscast. I haven’t ever liked him doing the cocky wisecracker routine. He just doesn’t have the charisma or the comic timing for it, and he always comes off as a vanilla pretty boy. I used to think that he was just a terrible actor, but after seeing him do well with more stoic, dramatic material in Captain America, I think he just too often gets cast in roles that don’t play to his strengths as an actor. Here he’s been chosen to play the male lead because he looks good with his shirt off. Seemingly no other consideration has been given to whether he’s right for the role or not. Filmmakers seem to keep using him as a replacement for Ryan Reynolds when they should be using him as a replacement for someone like Channing Tatum.
When you add up all of it’s disparate elements, What’s Your Number? comes out looking like a dumb movie that has no idea what it’s trying to accomplish other than mimicking other things that have come before it. How many more times do I have to watch a film about upper class white people trying to find love in ridiculously trendy night clubs and at absurdly posh weddings? Are rich white people the only ones who have trouble finding love? Are there really no other settings or character types that the romantic comedy wants to explore? And who is this movie geared towards anyways? It’s characters are a bunch of adults who are obsessed with their sex lives like they’re horny teenagers who just started getting it on. The main character drinks until she passes out three times in the first act alone. How are we supposed to feel about her alcoholism? If this is the sort of behavior we’re going to be watching, then why isn’t this movie about teenagers or college students? Has this been made for adults who wish they were still in high school? Yuck. What a shallow, contemptible film.
