Review: 'What's Your Number' -- wait for the DVD

Film: What's Your Number
Director: Mark Mylod
Cast: Anna Faris, Chris Evans and Ari Graynor
Rating: **

This film is a perfect example of a rubber-band idea, stretched to the limits and christened a female-centric rom-com.

What's Your Number draws its premise from a frivolous magazine article that says 96% of women who have slept with 20 or more men don't end up getting married.

Obviously freaked out by the revelation, Ally Darling (Anna, in various states of undress but endearingly adorable) sets on a mission to track down her 19 exes in the hope that one of them will magically turn husband-material.

For this, she engages the services of her neighbour Colin (Chris, also in various states of undress but distractingly hunky), a struggling musician, in exchange for shelter at her apartment after his never-ending one night stands. You can figure out where this investigation is headed.

Adapted for the screen by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden from Karyn Bosnak's 2006 novel, 20 Times a Lady, What's Your Number starts off on a high note but that happy journey is short-lived. Thirty minutes into the film, and it's just another rom-com which sets out on a promising assertion of women rights (read: sexual liberation) but travels the same a-woman-needs-a-man-to-be-complete road.

What does come out well is the stark differences in personalities, that of Ally, her younger to-be-married sister Daisy (Ari) and their prim and proper mother. So also those of all the men Ally's involved with. It's a bit unbelievable that it takes Ally as many as 19 men to realise she's always been what they wanted her to be and not the Ally she is or the Ally Colin sees.

Flashback scenes of Ally with some of her exes, the gay president-hopeful, the puppeteer who sneaks a puppet into bed, the Englishman around who Ally talks in the funniest accent, and her even Anna's real life husband Chris Patt are genuinely funny but not enough to hold their own. Even though Anna is her bubbly best breathing life into the non-existent screenplay, there's only so much she can do make the film worth a watch.

Nothing, from the music to the cinematography are memorable enough to write home about, except that Ally is a big Lionel Richie fan.

And Chris loiters about naked in at least three fourth of the film. And no, no woman should complain, 'cause, face it, he's hot.

Since chick-like comments have been passed, and the pointless exercise of making a list has been done with, sit back and wait for the DVD. It's the only way you could watch Chris and Anna's striptease basketball in rewind-pause-rewind mode and not complain about spending a bomb while doing so.