Review: What's Your Number?

Romantic comedies are a staple of the Hollywood moviemaking machine, and for good reason: people like to laugh and to enjoy a love story, an often unbeatable combination. Romantic comedies are also notoriously cheap to churn out, which explains why a retread with careworn tropes and outdated mores like What's Your Number? gets released.

Vacuous Ally Darling (Anna Faris) puts more effort in smoothing her unmussed hair and accentuating her already ample bust before her boyfriend rouses from bed than she does anything else in her life. But when she finds herself reading a women's glamrag article about the number of men the average woman sleeps with, she starts contemplating how many men she's bedded and to her horror realizes she's a slut, at least according to the magazine. Her insecurities go into overdrive as her sister's wedding approaches.

Cue the lothario Colin (Chris Evans) who lives across the hall, who first tantalizes us with obscured frontal nudity, then suddenly reveals he just happens to have the sleuthing skills to help Ally track down her exes so she doesn't sleep with one more guy and doom her to never marrying.

Anyone with a pulse could fathom the plot points, which isn't hard to do in the best comedies. But where a good comedy can overcome familiar material by refreshing twists in the plot or engaging performances, What's Your Number? simultaneously insults the audience's intelligence and forgoes any acknowledgement that the sexual revolution occurred in Ally's grandmother's day.

The implausibly contrived tropes have more in common with a Rob Schneider vehicle than with a Meg Ryan one, or even a Sarah Jessica Parker role. There's no ambition to question the hypocrisy or puritanical standards like Easy A did. Perhaps the writers assume that any woman who picks up a "women's magazine" is so desperately narcissistic she'll get meta and watch a movie about her neuroses? It's hard to tell, as the jokes and pratfalls seem to be apropos to nothing other than wasting time.

Apparently Hollywood is a hermetically sealed universe where the feminist movement never occured. The What's Your Number? script is so affected and unpalatable it was surprising to see that not only is it based on a book by a woman (Karyn Bosnak's novel 20 Times a Lady), but two women adapted it for the screen (Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden). It certainly doesn't feel like it, unless they were going for an empty and charmless Sex and the City vibe with a heavy dose of judgmental condescension. That's not to say Sex and the City the series, or even the first film lacked charm; they did. But it has much more in common with Sex and the City 2 (and The Hot Chick for that matter).

If you're a fan of romcoms like Maid of Honor, All About Steve or The Ugly Truth, you'll love What's Your Number?. Otherwise, save your money.