RENO 911!: MIAMI
R, 81 minutes

The most promising moment of “Reno 911!: Miami” is the five-minute skit that opens the film, simultaneously spoofing action films, police-oriented reality TV, and, of all things, the war on terror. But it’s all downhill from there for a film constructed as little more than a bloated episode of the Comedy Central television series.

The incompetent crew of the Reno Sheriff’s Department arrives one by one at a crime scene, sporting all the weaponry and sex appeal one would expect from a big-budget Hollywood production, and the last to arrive is the sexually-ambiguous Lt. Jim Dangle (Thomas Lennon), who launches his motorcycle into the air in true Arnold Schwarzenegger fashion — a classic Hollywood slow-motion entrance that hilariously crashes back to reality as the motorcycle hits the ground and crumbles beneath him.

For a fleeting moment, it seems “Miami” might go somewhere funny and interesting; maybe it will poke fun at today’s color-coded nation of paranoia, or even just Hollywood action fare.

But then, almost as a cruel joke, the fantasy comes to an end. It was all a dream, you see, and instantly we’re back in Reno, watching a pseudodocumentary of Reno’s dumbest and dullest.

“Miami’s” big twist, as most would likely guess from the title, is that the “Reno” boys and girls find themselves in Miami Beach. After being denied admission to a national police convention, they are quickly thrust into a position of power when an unknown biological agent leads to a quarantine of the convention. Suddenly, Miami’s desperate mayor (Patton Oswalt, in the movie’s only funny performance), is begging these out-of-towners to take charge of a policeless city.

What’s remarkable about “Miami” is how determinedly unremarkable it is. Comprised of threeto five-minute skits that mesh together clumsily and arbitrarily, the comedy alternates between awkward sexual asides (almost the whole squad spends one night masturbating in a hotel), stationhouse apathy (the female officers watch reruns of “Cops” on TV as 911 calls go unanswered), and incompetent house calls (two officers don’t know what to do with a swimming poolbound alligator).

As has always been the case with “Reno 911!,” its dry, faux-documentary approach doesn’t mesh with its exaggerated caricatures. Existing somewhere between the hyperreality of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries and the subtleties of TV’s “The Office,” “Reno 911!” seems confused, offering up stupid cops who are far too pathetic to be believed but then trapping them in awkward, “realistic” silences that never allow the pitfalls to build on each other.

S. James Snyder

THE NUMBER 23
R, 95 minutes

You know that part in a movie when the hero laboriously unravels some obvious clue that explains everything? That happens about every 19 seconds in “The Number 23,” a thriller that would bore a paranoiac. Dogcatcher Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey, in seriousmovie black hair) fixates on the numeral while reading a detective novel that reminds him of his own life. Thus begins his agonizingly slow and tedious descent into madness, to the halfhearted dismay of his wife (O, sweet Virginia Madsen, why?). The pointless puzzling multiplies unchecked: the human body has 23 pairs of chromosomes; the Mayans believed the world would end on December 23, 2012; 20 + 1 + 2 equals 23, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Scenes of Walter doing sums phase in and out with stylized scenes from the murder-mystery novel, which stars Mr. Carrey and soporific femmes fatales. A mysterious dog keeps popping up (which spurred nothing but laughter in the rowdy preview audience). Fernley Phillips’s screenplay draws out the movie’s setup with a shaggy-dog shuffle that lulls us to sleep long before the twists arrive, and his characters have the names of spam email: Agatha Sparrow, Miles Phoenix, Fingerling (just Fingerling). It’s as if there’s no one behind the wheel, which is not far from the truth: director Joel Schumacher, who nearly murdered the Batman franchise, directs the sunken-eyed Mr. Carrey and the curious goings-on with his inimitable pewter touch.

Which brings us to the biggest puzzle: what attracts the $20 million (but increasingly moroselooking) star to contrivances like this? Mr. Carrey seems repeatedly drawn to puppetmaster movie worlds where someone or something is pulling the strings. “The Truman Show” and “Bruce Almighty” were the most comprehensive, but don’t forget the memory wipes of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and the truth experiments of “Liar, Liar.” Again and again, elastic realities complement the star’s famous rubber face in a career of performances seemingly inspired by “Duck Amuck.”

“The Number 23” was never going to be easy to execute, since the premise basically spotlights the contingencies and coincidences that populate fiction and then hammers them into pulp. A story about obsessive-compulsive numerology seems doomed to self-destruct, but it should have done so sometime before actually getting filmed.

Nicolas Rapold