Movie review: What's Your Number?

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Genre: Comedy

Opens locally Friday, September 30th, 2011

Run Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes, Rated R

Starring: Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Blythe Danner, Joel McHale

Directed by Mark Mylod (The Big White)

It’s awful, humiliating, and horrible (or as fellow critic James Sanford called it on the way out: “whore”-ible.) If you need to know more, please read on.

​“What’s Your Number?” is a shoe-in for multiple Razzies this award season. The title doesn’t refer to the innocent, "what’s your phone number," but rather the number of people you have slept with. According to Marie Claire magazine (in the movie anyways), the average girl has more than 10 partners. And if you hit 20? Statistics say that you will never get married. This forms the moral base and compass on which all of the film’s characters are judged…if you have kept it under 20, you are respectable in this world, but 21 means you’re a slut.

Anna Faris is Ally, the village bicycle (hey, everyone’s taken a ride!! Ha ha! Heh…..hmmm.)…she’s a 20-something-er who has been laid off at her job and stumbles across the Marie Claire article, which really gets her worried. When she counts up the people she’s slept with, she finds that she is at the magical number 20, so anymore (whew, this is exhausting to even try to explain…) sex partners will make her unattainable to future beaus.

The hot hunk next door (Chris Evans) has a new girl each night, but he also can dig up dirt on people because his dad is a cop. Instead of tempting fate and finding somebody new, which would push her over the 20 limit, she decides to look up all of her exes to see if any of them are now suitable for marriage. The rest of the film has the two basically stalking these 20 guys as she goes through them one by one in order to find out if they are suitable. Hilarity ensues.

Or not. Despite one of the worst plots and stories in recent memory (more on that later), “What’s Your Number?” fails most of all because it is simply unfunny. Nothing in the film made me laugh, it was uninspired, lowbrow junk. Chris Evans, whom I’ve liked in other films, should be ashamed of himself, that he even appears in this one.
Anna Faris on the other hand, has made a career out of dumb, vulgar comedy. She seems nice enough, but I don’t find her funny. Clearly this wasn’t the right material to showcase her comedic skills, but she is not in the league of others that possess a bit more charisma and charm…think Goldie Hawn or Drew Barrymore. Here, Lucille Ball would have been reduced to crud.

More offensive than this comedy’s lack of comedy, is the premise of the film itself. In this world, it is cool to have 19 partners, but guys will dump you though if they hear you’ve been with 20. All males in the film exist as potential sex partners, and the worth of every female is based on her “number.” It is gratuitous, with unnecessary nudity, and shots of both leads shirtless or in underwear for most of the film. It was made for Beavis & Butthead, and maybe a horny teenager flipping through Cinemax’s Friday night line-up.

The few moments of “drama” towards the end of the film are out-of-place and totally undeserving. This has all the raunchy humor of recent R-Rated comedies, but without the laughs.

​At the end of the movie, a soon-to-be-classic line is delivered from Anna Faris, in what is meant to be a dramatic moment: “I am an unemployed whore who has slept with 20 people and just wants somebody to love me for that!” It’s not Shakespeare, but that line should have no problem withstanding the tests of time. The movie though, is as throw-away as it gets.