Ben Oliver

Now
Banner image for Identity Thief
film

Identity Thief

Friends don’t steal friends’ identities, do they?
05 October 2014

Melissa McCarthy plays a woman who steals Jason Bateman’s identity. For reasons I won’t go into, they wind up on a road trip together. Hilariously, they are very different people.

The film clocks in at two hours (!), but not one second of it will so much as put a grin on your face. It’s brutally tedious.

Nothing is right with Identity Thief. The story is all over the place, and makes no sense. Bateman and McCarthy aren’t funny together (he works ok as the straight guy but she really has no appeal, which hurts the film badly). The director seems to get bored with his own film (at 120 minutes, it looks like the editor does too…) and decides to phone in his work. The soundtrack is all wrong. The screenplay fails hilariously when it makes any attempt at emotion.

Mediocre in every way, it’s sad to think just how much money Identity Thief made. That means they think it’s ok to make shit like this. Strictly for Bateman completists and masochists.