The 2011 romantic comedy What’s Your Number?, starring Anna Faris and Chris Evans, is now available on Blu-ray. Faris plays Ally Darling, a 30-something single woman, who realizes she needs to find a man to marry before it’s too late. There are so many problems with What’s Your Number? it’s hard to know where to begin. Is it the paint-by-numbers script, the lame dialogue, or just the fact that this “comedy” is not funny? The only thing this movie has going for it is a likeable cast. Faris, Evans, along with Joel McHale, Chris Pratt, and Zachary Quinto in small parts are the only reason to give this below average film a glance.
Ally is down on her luck. On the same morning her boyfriend (Quinto) breaks up with her she gets fired from her marketing job. While reading a magazine on the way home from being fired, she learns that 96% of women with 20 or more .jpg?t=20120115150839)
sexual partners never marry. This alarms Ally. She hastily begins making a list of her past lovers, only to discover that she is at 19. Afraid of hitting the magic number of 20, she swears off sex until she find the man she is going to marry. It’s clear within the first five minutes of the movie who that man is going to be, but unfortunately things are not so obvious to Ally.
Ally ponders how she will find this dream man until one day she runs into her ex, “Disgusting Donald” (Pratt). Donald used to be fat and now he is thin. Donald is engaged, but his transformation makes Ally wonder if any of her other ex’s have improved with time. She enlists her neighbor Colin (Evans) to track them all down for her. Colin is a different woman every night kind of guy, so he is sympathetic to her situation. He’s also a starving musician, so he apparently has time to help her out. One by one Ally tries to reconnect with an ex hoping for a spark that will lead to marriage.
While the premise is fairly bland, it is not terrible. What’s Your Number? had the potential to be funny, but most of the jokes fall flat. Faris has demonstrated great comic timing in the past (Scary Movie, The House Bunny), but the material doesn’t work for her here. Part of the problem is that you can either see the joke coming a mile away, or a joke is set up with no pay-off. The funniest moments are between Faris and her real life husband Pratt. Everything else is fairly predictable. Ally’s sister (Ari Graynor) is getting married, much to their perfectionist mother’s (Blythe Danner) delight. Their mom also wants Ally to get married, and she cares more about stability and money than love.
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