The key to enjoying What’s Your Number?, a new romantic comedy starring the effervescent Anna Faris, is managed expectations. If you go in expecting the raunchy, subversive humor and girl-power love that you got from this summer’s Bridesmaids, you’ll be disappointed. But this girl-meets-20 boys comedy does have its charms.
Chief among them is Anna Faris, who plays Ally Darling. At the start of the film, Ally is having a particularly bad day. She begins by breaking up with her latest Mr. Wrong (Zachary Quinto), a vegan bike messenger who’s too commitment phobic to go with Ally to her sister’s wedding. Later, she gets fired by her weird, finger-sniffing boss (Joel McHale) and reads an article in Marie Claire magazine claiming that the average number of sexual partners for most women is 10 and those with more than 20 will never marry.
This is not good news for Ally. Upon tallying her “number,” she discovers that she is dangerously close to that lonely-spinster-forever integer. So she decides to put the kibosh on new lovers and track down her exes instead, hoping to find that one of them is a previously overlooked gem.
To this end, she enlists her smoking-hot neighbor, Colin (Chris Evans), to help her locate and re-date her exes. Colin also happens to be her “slutty” counterpart, who beds a new girl every night and picks up his newspaper naked every morning. In exchange for his help, Ally allows him to hide out in her apartment from the conquests he’s looking to ditch. Sidebar: all girls should be lucky enough to wake up to Chris Evans and his Captain America physique answering the door clad in nothing but a strategically placed dishtowel each and every day.
Penned by seasoned sitcom writers Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden (from the book 20 Times a Lady by Karyn Bosnack), What’s Your Number? is really a traditional romantic comedy, wrapped up in a slightly raunchy package. Even though Ally and Colin talk about vaginas and hand jobs a lot, Allan and Crittenden still have true love and happily ever after on their brains.
Along the way to that goal, director Mark Mylod allows Faris to do what she does best. That is to charm the pants off of us with wholesome Playboy-bunny-next-door good looks and dumb-like-a-fox delivery. It’s her signature technique, previously showcased in a whole host of Scary Movie installments, as well as (my personal favorite) 2008’s The House Bunny. What’s Your Number? isn’t as funny as that film, but then Emma Stone and Kat Dennings aren’t there to support Faris’ doe-eyed schtick.
Instead, she’s got Ari Graynor as her perfect, soon-to-be-wed sister and Blythe Danner as her overbearing would-be social climber mother. Both actresses are obviously capable of a lot more but have completely underwritten characters. This, I assume, is to make more room for the parade of exes that include Andy Samberg (the puppeteer), Chris Pratt (Faris’s real-life hubs), Martin Freeman (the British one), Thomas Lennon (the Criss-Angel wannabe), Mike Vogel (the gynecologist), Anthony Mackie (the black, gay Republican), and Dave Annable (the wealthy dreamboat). That’s only a small sample of her 20 lovers, but it’s still way too many. The funniest of the bunch is Samberg, coincidentally on-screen the least. Meanwhile, the encounter with Freeman lets Faris show off a series of terrible accents to hilarious effect. The rest are just there to illustrate the way that Ally has of morphing her personality and appearance to suit the men she’s with.
That’s something she doesn’t have to do (hint, hint) in her developing friendship with gorgeous Colin, who the writers shrewdly resist turning into Henry Higgins (or worse yet, that douchebag Gerard Butler played in The Ugly Truth). Not only does the pair have an offbeat kind of chemistry, Evans also does an admirable job–with a too-long look here and a hidden smile there–of showing Colin falling for Ally at a believable pace.
What’s Your Number? is hardly groundbreaking stuff. Actually,it’s a chick-flick date movie in one of its clearest iterations. Still, Anna Faris is adorable enough that you want good things for that self-professed “jobless whore who’s slept with 20 guys.” And did I mention Chris Evans was good looking?
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Good review! I agree it wasn’t exactly amazing but was definitely worth the watch. Anna Faris was really enjoyable to watch and yeah Chris Evans! lol