A journalist (Berry) goes undercover to ferret out businessman Harrison Hill (Willis) as her best friend’s killer. Posing as one of his temps, she enters into a game of online cat-and-mouse.
1: A number is just a number. Or is it? 2: First it takes hold of your mind…then it takes hold of your life. 3: The truth will find you.
Plot Summary:
On his birthday, Walter Sparrow, an amiable dog-catcher, takes a call that leaves him dog bit and late to pick up his wife. She’s browsed in a bookstore, finding a blood-red-covered novel, a murder mystery with numerology that loops constantly around the number 23. The story captivates Walter: he dreams it, he notices aspects of his life that can be rendered by “23,” he searches for the author, he stays in the hotel (in room 23) where events in the novel took place, and he begins to believe it was no novel. His wife and son try to help him, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes to protect him. Slowly, with danger to himself and to his family, he closes in on the truth.
Wealthy, brilliant, and meticulous Ted Crawford, a structural engineer in Los Angeles, shoots his wife and entraps her lover. He signs a confession; at the arraignment, he asserts his rights to represent himself and asks the court to move immediately to trial. The prosecutor is Willy Beachum, a hotshot who’s soon to join a fancy civil-law firm, told by everyone it’s an open and shut case. Crawford sees Beachum’s weakness, the hairline fracture of his character: Willy’s a winner. The engineer sets in motion a clockwork crime with all the objects moving in predictable ways.
Martin Freeman plays Chris, a frustrated TV producer who is forced to leave his unreliable flatmate Bob played by Velibor Topic in charge of showing a series of real estate agents around the house he is trying to sell. Worried by Bob’s habit of spending all day working in the basement playing loud music, Chris asks his friend to listen out for the door bell and show anyone who comes calling inside. Bob promises to do exactly that and for once, not to let him down. Over the course of the day, whilst Chris struggles to cope with his insane TV presenter colleague Jerry, played by Richard Harrington - back at the house it is soon clear that bonkers Bob is taking his promise to Chris rather too literally. Bob has indeed, allowed anyone inside, including a couple of gun-toting gangsters - an incompetent young Brit played by Danny Dyer and an incontinent American played by Corey Johnson. That evening, Chris is surprised to return home and find his flatmate, four estate agents, two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a corpse and a terrified children’s entertainer in what remains of his flooded kitchen. Of course, a roomful of water and broken furniture doesn’t mean the end of the world - but the half-crazed American sitting outside the toilet with a gun, just might.
