After getting fired from her job, Ally reads a magazine article about what the number of sex partners says about a woman. She discovers the average number of lovers a woman will ever have is 10, which makes her apprehensive about her own number, which happens to be 19. After a one-night stand with her ex-boss, Ally is determined to keep her number at 20, which means seeking out past lovers to give them a second look for a potential future. Since she’s not entirely sure where to start, she recruits her womanizing neighbor, Colin, to help her. He’ll track down the list of men she gives him, and in return, he can use her apartment to hide from his one-night stands until they get the hint and leave.
This was a really cute movie. I think Anna Faris is hilarious with the right script and Chris Evans is… well, Chris Evans. Charming, cocky, and beautiful. I thought they also had fun, palpable chemistry that made the process from neighbors to friends to lovers quite believable. It was Faris’s scenes with Evans that really made the movie for me, although I did enjoy watching Ally seek out her exes and attempt to be the perfect girl for them.
There’s a running gag where she continually runs into an old boyfriend nicknamed “Disgusting Donald” who is super fit now and engaged to a beautiful woman – of course, it had to be played by Faris’s husband at the time, Chris Pratt. Martin Freeman, Anthony Mackie, and Adam Samberg all show up as various exes of Ally’s as well, including Dave Annable as the elusive Mr. Perfect and number one on Ally’s list of exes. Of course, Ally has to revisit her past relationships in order to realize that the right guy may just be across the hall. Wink, wink.
The humor in this movie borders on raunchy but it never goes over the line into too much. There is plenty of laugh out loud moments, thanks mostly to Faris’s talent with physically awkward comedy. But small things, like Samberg’s puppet making an appearance during a sex scene, and Joel McHale smelling his fingers after… er, adjusting himself… okay, that’s more icky than funny, but it still managed to elicit a giggle from me.
Maybe What’s Your Number doesn’t boast of originality but it’s still incredibly fun and the typical rom-com tropes are executed really well. You could probably take this movie and write an article on its theme of independent women and their sexuality, but I don’t think it’s that deep. Ally shouldn’t be ashamed of how many lovers she’s had, no matter what a magazine may say. I liked the fact that Colin never judges her for it, except to perhaps laugh at her choices, rather than her number. It’s about accepting the flaws of someone you love, if you want to count one’s sex history as a flaw. It all depends on how you look at it, I suppose.
I would recommend this movie for anyone who likes a bit of a bite to their rom-coms… or who just want to see Chris Evans mostly naked a few times. That works too!
