WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?

Here’s the thing: there are two movies happening in What’s Your Number?—one is a cute, innocuous rom-com; the other wants to be Bridesmaids Lite. I liked the former but thought the latter crass-ified the whole thing.

Anna Faris stars as Ally Darling, a recently dumped and recently fired gal, who panics when she reads a magazine article claiming women who sleep with more than 20 never find a mate. Ally’s already slept with 19, so she decides to be celibate until she finds the guy she’s meant to marry. After a chance encounter with a hugely improved ex (Faris’ real-life husband, Chris Pratt), she sets out to find the rest of her former beaus just in case one of them has somehow evolved into prime husband material since their break-up.

Helping her on her quest is her across-the-hall neighbor, Colin (a surprisingly charming and likable Chris Evans), an unapologetic womanizer, who relishes his never-ending stream of one night stands. He agrees to track down Ally’s old flames in exchange for refuge in her apartment on those mornings when he hopes his bedmate-of-the-moment just packs her stuff and leaves.

The bulk of the film is Ally being reunited with old boyfriends—played by everyone from Martin Freeman to Andy Samberg, Anthony Mackie and Dave Annabelle—while simultaneously having an increasingly wonderful time with an increasingly smitten Colin. Anyone who can’t telegraph where the paint-by-numbers story is headed has obviously never watched a movie before.

On the one hand, the movie is sort of sweet. Faris is goofy and funny in that early Goldie Hawn way, and it’s hard not to root for her even though she’s essentially setting the women’s movement back a few decades by making man-hunting her entire raison d’être. Likewise, Evans is exactly the right combination of scoundrel and prince, and I was impressed that the usually bland actor actually added some spark to the proceedings.

On the other hand, there’s plenty in the film that’s not so sweet. There’s a lot of needlessly blue and raunchy humor that feels way out of place, as though the filmmakers thought having characters speak graphically about sex would add some “edge” to what would otherwise be a pleasant, but not exceptional, comedy. There are a few pointlessly gratuitous shots of nudity, clearly performed by body doubles. Worst of all, the plot and the characters’ motivations don’t make a whole lot of sense—despite living across the hall from each other, had Ally and Colin really never met before the moment the story required them to?—and the big “turning point” 2/3 of the way through the film feels completely overblown and ridiculous.

I will say that the fact the movie works at all is due to Faris, who deserves better material. Again, had the R-rated crap been left out, and more time devoted to building a more realistic, less manic lead character, I’m pretty sure I’d be dishing out more than four slices.