The Details

What’s Your Number?

Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Ari Graynor

Directed by Mark Mylod

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

Official Movie Site

IMDb: What’s Your Number?

Rotten Tomatoes: What’s Your Number?

It’s one of the great tragedies of Hollywood that Anna Faris does not get better roles. Even as an executive producer of What’s Your Number?, Faris apparently can’t find better material than this by-the-numbers romantic comedy, which allows glimpses of the comedic gifts on display in movies like Smiley Face and The House Bunny but mostly just goes through the rom-com motions. It has a gimmicky set-up fit for a Katherine Heigl movie, with Faris’ Ally deciding that she’s slept with too many men and needs to go back through her previous lovers to find the one she’s meant to be with (since she can’t have sex with anybody new). To this end, she enlists her womanizing neighbor Colin (Chris Evans), who helps her track down her various exes while relentlessly hitting on her. Will it turn out that this bad boy with a heart of gold, the only person who appreciates Ally’s hobby of making weird little sculptures, is actually her soul mate? Only the brain dead don’t know the answer to that question.

So Number wearily hits all the expected beats of the genre, wasting time with Ally’s various former boyfriends even though it’s obvious from the first moments of the film where things are headed. And the early part of the movie, with Ally freaking out that she’s been with too many guys and is thus now somehow toxic and unlovable, veers dangerously close to being Slut Shaming: The Movie. Luckily one of the valuable life lessons that Ally learns is not to judge herself (or allow others to judge her) by those criteria, so that’s one vague semi-feminist point in the movie’s favor.

Faris’ goofy comic energy comes through at times, and she and Evans have better chemistry than a lot of romantic pairs in movies like this. But given how hilariously creative Faris can be if working with the right material, and the way that Bridesmaids demonstrated that female-driven comedy doesn’t have to hinge on meet-cutes and happily-ever-afters, Number feels less like a showcase for its star than just another glossy barrier holding back her potential.