What's Your Number?

One of these days, Anna Faris is going to find a comic vehicle that really gets to show off her talents. I've admired her in a lot of films, and she has the personality and timing to get laughs, even if the film she's stuck in isn't really working. Sadly, What's Your Number is yet another case of this. This is a generic and overlong romantic comedy that gets by for a little while solely on Faris' humor and charm, but the recycled plot and rehashed cliches come at the audience so strongly, we lose interest. The movie tries to grab our attention by being a vulgar and raunchy female-centered comedy, but that only makes us think that Bridesmaids this past summer did it better.

Faris plays Ally Darling, a 30-something woman who has just lost her job, but seems much more concerned by the fact that she still hasn't found the man she wants to spend her life with. It's been on her mind a lot, especially since she's been helping her sister (Ari Graynor) prepare for her wedding. One day on the subway, Ally reads an article in a magazine that talks about the significance of the number of men a women has slept with, as apparently 20 or more will doom a woman to eternal single status. Ally goes through her own personal sexual history, and is shocked to discover she's at 19. The fact that all of her friends are at much lower numbers doesn't help matters. With this information fresh in her mind, Ally becomes determined that her "number 20" will be special, as well as the one that she spends the rest of her life with.

Not long after making this proclamation, Ally has a run-in with one of her ex-boyfriends, who is not only a lot more handsome than she remembers him being, but is also getting married to a beautiful and intelligent young woman. This gets Ally wondering if any of the other 18 men she slept with might have gotten better over time, and maybe she is missing out. To find out, she enlists the aid of Colin (Chris Evans), the man who lives in the apartment across from her, and is always sneaking into Ally's apartment in various stages of undress, so that he can avoid the current woman he's just had a one-night stand with the night before. Ally decides to strike a deal with Colin - She'll continue to let him come and go from her apartment as he pleases, and use it to hide out from his bad dates, if he will help track down all of her ex-boyfriends.

This makes up a majority of the picture, with Ally tracking down all of her exes. There are some likable actors appearing in cameos in these roles, including Martin Freeman, who goes on a very funny date with Ally (Ally starts the date off pretending she has a British accent, but as the date goes on and she becomes more drunk, her accent keeps on changing during the course of the night.), Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg as a geeky guy obsessed with puppets, Tom Lennon as a Florida gynecologist who only remembers Ally when she spreads her legs on his examining table, and Anthony Mackie as a Washington politician who only wants to marry Ally to help his career, because he's secretly gay. While all this is going on, naturally Colin (who has been helping her find all these guys) begins to become interested in Ally. It's glaringly obvious the entire time that Ally is starting to fall for him also, which makes the entire middle section of the film completely pointless.

What's Your Number does have a few laughs, most of them provided by Faris' natural comic charm and timing, and some provided by the disastrous dates mentioned above. But mostly, this is strictly a paint-by-numbers screenplay that follows a rigid course of predictability. There's nothing here to surprise us, and despite the natural charm of the lead actors, no one that we really like enough to carry us through the entire movie. As the cliches and romantic comedy conventions start getting piled on, the film actually becomes tiresome. I was ready for it to end long before it did. There's just very little life to give the rehashed material the lift it needs. Director Mike Mylod (a veteran TV director) makes everything so bland, it's hard to care about what we're watching. The likable chemistry of Faris and Evans helps for a little while, but they just can't carry the dead weight all by themselves.

What we have here is yet another case of Anna Faris brightening up material that is obviously far beneath her talent. She deserves better, and so do audiences. Maybe the filmmakers knew that the material was tired old hat, and thought Faris' presence alone would fix things. I can only hope that someday someone puts her in a movie that really uses her talent, instead of simply using her to salvage a sinking project.

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