Movie Review: ‘Identity Thief’

The generation of credit card ease is inhibited by pain of possible identity theft. It’s a law of the universe. And there you have your highfalutin explanation of an exceptionally odious movie experience.
Movie Review: ‘Identity Thief’
Jason Bateman and Amanda Peet in “Identity Thief,” a comedy in which a man becomes crazed to settle a bad credit score after someone steals his identity. (Bob Mahoney/Universal Studios)
Mark Jackson
2/6/2013
Updated:
9/29/2015
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“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” 

The generation of credit card ease is inhibited by pain of possible identity theft. It’s a law of the universe. And there you have your highfalutin explanation of an exceptionally odious movie experience.

Sandy Bigelow Patterson (Jason Bateman) is an everyman living in Colorado. Diana (Melissa McCarthy) is a Floridian phone-phishing scam artist who steals Sandy’s unisex name, and credit cards, and then starts swinging from the chandeliers in bars and running up astronomical tabs for all her newfound inebriated “friends.” 

She jams up his life, he goes to the cops, the cops shrug their shoulders—he flies to Florida.

He manages to track her down, but she’s a salty con lady whereas he’s a gullible milquetoast, so she punches him in the throat and escapes. He finds her again and cuffs her. (Before he left, his wife said of the cuffs, “Do you even know how to use those?”). She promptly removes the cuffs with a bobby pin.

Now, it turns out, Diana also conned a jailhouse con’s henchman—a henchman and a henchwoman, actually. Threatened with death, they also come a-calling. And there’s a skiptracer, played appropriately by the same guy who played the t2 terminator in “Terminator 2,” which was sort of a molten-metal robotic skiptracer (casting at its finest).

They escape the hench-people. Diana goes along with Sandy (as he’s the least of three evils), and it becomes a silly road movie slash odd-couple buddy movie a la “Midnight Run.” 

However Bateman’s no Robert De Niro and McCarthy’s no Charles Grodin, which is not really fair, because … well, when in doubt—blame the script and the director. Let’s do that right now.

The t2 terminator, I mean skiptracer, finally manages to snatch Diana; but Sandy, in a rare moment of macho, manages to run Termy’s, I mean Skippy’s, van off the road with his rental car. Sandy and Diana then hike through the woods. 

While Sandy is sleeping, a big snake crawls up his trousers, which causes him to scream and then ditch his pants with alacrity. So now they’ve got no wallet or ID.

<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/Identity+Thief28B9.jpg"><img class="size-large wp-image-344902" title="Identity Thief" src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/Identity+Thief28B9-676x450.jpg" width="590" height="393"/></a>

[etRating value=“ 1”]

 

Mark Jackson is the chief film critic for The Epoch Times. In addition to the world’s number-one storytelling vehicle—film, he enjoys martial arts, weightlifting, Harley-Davidsons, vision questing, rock-climbing, qigong, oil painting, and human rights activism. Mark earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College, followed by a classical theater training, and has 20 years’ experience as a New York professional actor, working in theater, commercials, and television daytime dramas. He recently narrated the Epoch Times audiobook “How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World,” which is available on iTunes and Audible. Mr. Jackson is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic.
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