What's Your Number? (2011)

What's Your Number? arrives from 2011, a Boston-set romantic comedy in which Anna Faris plays a woman who reads a magazine article claiming that any woman who has taken twenty or more lovers is unlikely to marry. She is at nineteen. The rest of the runtime concerns her hunt for a husband among her ex-boyfriends, a scheme to freeze the tally where it stands. A studio once found this charming. The years have not been kind.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a near-vacuum. Tika Sumpter appears among the supporting players, present and unremarked upon, which was the studio comedy norm of the moment. There is no engagement with race as a subject, no LGBTQ presence, no environmental concern, no economic critique, no interest in neurodivergence. The layoff that opens the plot is a device for the dating quest, not an indictment of anything. A running gag concerns a former boyfriend once known as Disgusting Donald, now slim and therefore marriageable, a joke that reinforces the very standards it might have questioned. The film's attitude toward its heroine supplies its quietest discomfort. Ally's arc ends not in self-acceptance but in the discovery that her number is, after all, exactly twenty, and that Colin is the twentieth and presumably final entry. The resolution is a punchline about the count, not a rejection of it. A woman at the center of a story is not the same as a feminist story, and this one treats its protagonist's worth as arithmetic.

A brisk, joke-driven comedy, it never stops to instruct. There is no sermon to deliver, no moral to append, no lecture at the close. The film simply wants to be liked, and it largely is not, earning a critical drubbing and a modest box office. Its cultural footprint is faint. To the classifier it presents a tidy specimen: a romantic comedy built on the belief that a woman's romantic history is a liability, delivered with a smile and no apparent awareness that anyone might object. We file it accordingly, without malice, and move on.