Imagine for a second that you were a bus driver and one day, you suddenly drove your busload of sixth graders off the road and into a ditch, or that you were a baker and you "accidentally" laced a few donuts with arsenic, or that you were a secretary who tripped and fell while holding a letter opener that subsequently flew across the room and into your boss's eye.

If you were any of these regular people who held any of these regular jobs and any of these things happened to you, you'd never work in that job again. In fact, people get fired for a lot less. To make matters worse, that transgression would follow you around like a bad odor, making it all but impossible to find another job. In the real world, bad performance in the workplace has serious consequences.

Take director Joel Schumacher for instance. He directed "Batman & Robin," one of the worst big-budget movies to ever see the light of day. After that, shouldn't that be it for your directing career? That's like steering your ship into an iceberg. I wouldn't let Schumacher in a theater to watch a movie much less direct one.

Fortunately for Schumacher, Hollywood is not the real world and bad job performance rarely has consequences, so Mr. Schumacher is back with "The Number 23," a thriller involving paranoia and numerology that's slightly more engaging than a middle school math class with Mr. Monotone Geezer.

The problem with "The Number 23" is that there's never a reason to care. Numerology is only interesting when it's not taken too seriously, but when you're Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) and your wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen), buys you a book for your birthday that turns you into a raving lunatic, then numerology becomes one of those things like your '70s bell bottom fetish that you just want to shove in a closet and forget about. Sadly, the film kind of scrapes the bottom of the numerology/conspiracy barrel and the explanations for the relevance of certain numbers hits barrel bottom quickly.

It would be one thing if Sparrow was a loner, but the story also involves Agatha and the couple's son, Robin (Logan Lerman). That Agatha and Robin begin tagging along on Walter's paranoid adventures as if it was a trip to the zoo adds a bad sitcom element to the whole endeavor, though none of it's supposed to be funny. The bizarre casting doesn't help things either. Jim Carrey looks like he wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but can't. And while it's nice that Carrey and Madsen are at least an age-appropriate couple, Madsen is a mediocre actress at best whose role opposite Carrey feels like a challenge one might get in acting class under the heading: "What to do when your partner does nothing."

The fact that I came up with exactly 22 reasons not to see this film proves it's not worth seeing.