Like all the great movie clowns before him, Jim Carrey wants to be taken seriously as an actor and have the option of occasionally playing dramatic roles. In interviews, he's always said he'd prefer to follow "the career pattern of Robin Williams than Jerry Lewis."

And in his saner roles -- "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "The Majestic" -- he's shown that he can hold the screen well when he's not bouncing off the walls. He's a likable, charismatic guy, and you can almost see him playing Tom Hanks roles.

But if he's ever to fully establish himself as a leading man, he's going to have to make better choices than "The Number 23," an unengaging and colossally dumb occult thriller in which he seems to be trying to emulate Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."

He plays a dogcatcher (yes, dogcatcher) in some unnamed Middle American town whose seemingly well-adjusted life comes unraveled when his wife (Virginia Madsen) gives him a self-published novel she finds in a used bookstore called "The Number 23."

The book plays off the significance occultists find in the double digit and, as he reads it, he comes to believe that its hard-boiled detective story -- which is dramatized in "Sin City"-like snippets with Carrey as the hero -- is based on his life.

Like the fictional hero, he also becomes obsessed by the paranoid notion that he's "cursed" by the number -- that so many elements of his existence can be reduced to it that it is not only ruling his life, it's also pursuing him and out to kill him.

This is the setup, and the story fumbles along from there without sparking any intellectual interest, nail-biting suspense or macabre thrills as it works to one of those de rigueur twist endings you'll figure out long before you're supposed to.

But what makes this movie such a slap in the face is that its plot makes no sense. Being surreal and dreamlike is one thing, but the elements add up so poorly that the story could have been concocted by a marginally talented chimpanzee.

Moreover, it does absolutely nothing with its concept. The script doesn't make a persuasive case for the number's special significance, nor does director Joel Schumacher fulfill the promise of the ad campaign to build an intriguing "Da Vinci Code"-like puzzle around it.

As a star vehicle, the movie is also a dud. Carrey is vaguely sympathetic in the part and doesn't embarrass himself. But the only time he comes alive is the handful of moments in which his character cracks a joke or otherwise goes for a laugh. Carrey is good at that.