What's Your Number? Provides Us With Some Good Jokes, But Mostly A Naked Chris Evans.

 

I almost died laughing.

Last night, when I got back from my dance concert (approx 7 hours of dancing, total of 10 hours over the weekend), I was exhausted.  All I could think of was food and putting my feet up.  I ended up inhaling a large bowl of noodles and watching "What’s Your Number?" with Anna Faris and Chris Evans.  I'm a sucker for rom-coms.

Read more after the jump! (Unless you haven't seen the movie. Then I suggest you stop here.)




Anna Farris plays Ally, a good hearted but perhaps not the brightest 20-something, who juggles her little sister's wedding, pleasing both her divorced parents and her newly unemployed status.  While taking the subway home after being let go, Ally reads a woman’s magazine that tells her that 1) the average number of sexual partners an American woman has is 10.5, and 2) once a woman passes 20 sexual partners, her chances of having a long-term relationship lessens.  Apparently, all decent men have an idea of their perfect woman, and having over 20 sexual partners will make her less appealing to these men.  Ally begins to freak out because her number is... 19!

In the first 20 minutes we discover Ally may be an alcoholic and that she can't keep her legs shut.  She sleeps with her ex boss (the one that fires her), taking her total up to 20.  Ally decides to go back over her ex-boyfriends to see if any of them have gotten any better over time.  Colin (Chris Evans), Ally's neighbour, comes in with a detective background (I think his parents were detectives? I missed this part, too busy drooling over how hot Chris was), and Ally uses him to track down her ex-boyfriends while he uses her to escape his one-night-stands.

What I wish the movie would have done is shown more of Ally’s past sexual partners.  Knowing Anna Farris, this could have been a good 5 minutes of comedy, with me uncontrollably laughing until tears streamed down my face.  Instead, we were shown a naked Chris Evans for about 50% of the movie's running time (not that I'm complaining).  I wish we had more Colin/Ally moments like the strip-HORSE because I could have watched their banter for hours.  I enjoyed their honesty with each other with no judgement, and I wish all my relationships were like that.  You could tell there was some chemistry between these two actors and both of them are good at what they do - comedy and looking cute. 

The ending was of course cheesy and predictable, but not so much that I threw up my bowl of noodles (I'm looking at you 'Just Friends', 'Friends with Benefits' and just about every Katherine Heigl movie). There was running, awkward interruptions and confessions just like every other rom-com, but 'What's Your Number' does it well enough that it is not too unrealistic. Anna Farris was only slightly irritating, only because her character just seemed like a bitch (who asks their friends to put the number of sexual partners in a hat and then guess who’s number belongs to whom? Just wrong) and just your typical mess. Chris Evans seemed to have been held back as I know he can be much cuter and funnier, without having to take his shirt off every 5 minutes (not that I'm complaining). . The movie itself could have done better.  With two actors like Farris and Evans, the movie could have been much funnier and raunchier, which is the perfect recipe for rom-coms of 2011.  I will definitely watch this again, although probably not as often as I do '27 Dresses' and 'Friends with Benefits' :).

Rating: 7/10 - This movie is worth the buck and worth the two hours. If there was just one more naked Chris Evans scene (preferably the one where he and Faris make it to the official number 20), I would have given it 7.5/10.

Truth.