Credit: 20th Century Fox

When it was first released, What’s Your Number? got absolutely battered by critics and got chucked into that corner where underperforming rom-coms go to die… But viewers have hauled it back out, sending the Anna Faris and Chris Evans comedy to number eight on the global English movie chart of Netflix with 2.6million views and into the US Top 10 as well. Well, look at that. Fifteen years later and, wham, there it is again, strolling back into the charts like 2011 never happened.

It starts with Ally Darling, played by Faris, who gets fired and, on her way back, reads a magazine article claiming women who sleep with 20 men have less chance of getting married. It doesn’t take her long before she realises she is just one man away from hitting that number. Nineteen men. That’s the catastrophe. Curtain down, pack it in because the husband’s shop is shut.

Sounds a little crazy but believable, and there is your film.

Ally decides man number 20 cannot happen, so instead of trashing the article and getting on with her life, she starts tracking down her exes to see whether one of them has turned into husband material. Because if she does that, she will be sleeping with one of the 19 men, and that way, the number never goes up.

Just then, like a saviour, comes Chris Evans across the hall as Colin Shea, who has slept with God knows how many women and does not seem to be bothered about it, while Ally is over here acting like one magazine article has just told her she has ruined her life. Before long, she has dragged him into this mad little mission to hunt down all her exes and see whether one of them has become husband material over time.

But that is rom-coms for you, isn’t it? Half the time you know who is ending up with whom before the film has even got going, and nobody really cares because the fun is in watching them make a bloody mess of getting there. Ally and Colin could probably save themselves a lot of bother by having one normal conversation, but where is the film in that?

And then you remember Evans made this in the same year as Captain America: The First Avenger and yeah, take a minute to process. Sorry, what? While Steve Rogers is running around with the shield and saving the day, Colin Shea is wandering about half-naked and helping Anna Faris track down men she used to shag. Same year. What a switch-up.

Did you know this flop is actually a book adaptation? Yeah, it came from Karyn Bosnak’s novel 20 Times a Lady, which explains why the whole thing is so obsessed with “the number”, while Mark Mylod directed it years before Succession had him dealing with the Roy family. So watching this now is a bit of a trip, because you have Evans right on the edge of becoming Captain America, Mylod nowhere near Waystar Royco yet.

Now, are we going to pretend? What’s Your Number? is some masterpiece everyone was too stupid to understand in 2011? God, no. The whole idea around Ally’s number has aged like milk, and the romance is obvious from miles away, but you know what, it’s a fun film to watch.

And you can see why people are watching it now. Anna Faris. Chris Evans. Easy rom-com. Job done. Nobody is putting it on because they fancy reassessing early-2010s gender politics on a Tuesday night. It’s the nostalgia driving the film.