Identity Thief is the latest film from director Seth Gordon (whose filmography includes 2011's Horrible Bosses, which also featured Jason Bateman) and stars Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy. The story is fairly straightforward; Bateman plays a Denver native and accounts executive Sandy Bigelow Patterson, who was named after baseball legend Sandy Koufax by his late father. He is working at a firm run by cinema's 2,789th horrible boss, Harold Cornish (Jon Favreau), and leaves the firm at the beginning of the film to work as a VP at a new firm set up by coworker Daniel Casey. His identity is stolen by Diana (McCarthy), an identity thief living in Winter Park, Florida. She uses his credit cards to make outrageous purchases, including massive amounts of alcohol at local bars, a Fiat 500 with a custom paint job, and numerous appointments at a local salon. When a Denver detective tells him he missed a court date in Florida, he realizes his identity has been stolen. His credit score has been ruined, and Daniel mentions that it will deter possible clients. Patterson realizes who the thief is, and travels to Florida to apprehend Diana and bring her to justice in Denver, because apparently the Denver police force is incredibly inept and cannot afford to expend a single detective to catch an identity thief. Patterson arrives in FLorida and promptly finds Diana, and he takes her on a road trip to Denver, as his plane ticket sare rendered invalid by the identity crisis and Diana secretly owes debts to a drug dealer who is now in prison, and the duo is pursued by his enforcers Marisol (Genesis Rodríguez) and Julian (T.I.). From that point on, "hilarity" ensues on their road trip throughout the country. I use the term "hilarity" loosely here because it really doesn't apply. When watching the film, I couldn't help but notice the numerous corners director Gordon had cut when making his film, and it shows in the final product. The movie felt so... cliché, to say the least. Favreau's character seems as if he was made from the same cookiecutter as Kevin Spacey's character in Horrible Bosses, who also happened to play the role of Bateman's boss. The police force is so inept that it makes them look like they come out of a superhero film, as they cannot even expend a single officer to apprehend a criminal, preferring to send the victim and risk his life. There is also massive amounts of typecasting in the roles of the lead characters. Bateman has, unfortunately, often been thrust into the role of the imperiled everyman, when in fact he has more talents as an actor. We appreciated this in Arrested Development, but from there it goes downhill. There's The Switch, Horrible Bosses (which is the most forgivable of these films), and, worst of all, The Change-Up. He almost always plays an upper-middle class office worker who is being screwed over at work and has to go to extreme measures to solve his unusual problems. As for McCarthy, her character feels like a criminal variation of Megan, her character from Bridesmaids, one of her first major successes as an actress. It is from here on out that her films have been loaded with crude humor that has started to become unappealing. Yes, it can be funny in small doses, but only when coupled with decent jokes of another nature. Unfortunately, this film had a high density of shock humor and nothing to back it up, resulting in a failure of a film. That said, Bateman and McCarthy has excellent onscreen chemistry; their scenes that show their evolution as friends is good, aside from the obvious fact that jokes have been crammed into their dialogue, much as a squirrel would cram nuts into its cheeks. John Cho's role actually avoided being typecast, with his Harold & Kumar past, and he has evolved into a fine actor who can play a comedic strait man.
Consensus: Identity Thief is a below-average comedy film that takes road/buddy film clichés and amplifies the typecasting of its actors to create this monstrosity, only redeemed by the lead actors' chemistry.
Rating: 2/5
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