Although Jason Bateman is now known for his deadpan stare in the face of humor, he doesn’t have much to laugh at anyway in Identity Thief. Similarly, T.I. and Genesis Rodriguez, who play the drug dealers trying to track down Bateman and McCarthy, also provide nothing more than a pointless distraction.
Jason Bateman (Disconnect) never laughs, and at this point, his unfettered grimace in the wake of even the funniest situations has made him one of Hollywood’s go-to funnymen.
But even the best straight man is only as good as the comedy he refuses to react to, and in the case of imbalanced road trip film Identity Thief, Bateman probably isn’t laughing because there isn’t much to laugh at.
The real problem with Identity Thief is it simply can’t decide what kind of film it wants to be, rushing from comedy to action set piece to heavy-handed drama with wild abandon.
The story involves Sandy Bigelow Patterson (Bateman), a financial number cruncher who has his identity stolen by lonely criminal Diana, played wonderfully by Melissa McCarthy (This Is 40), the shining center of an otherwise droll film.
When Sandy realizes the cops aren’t going to help him put his life back together, he concocts a preposterous plan to fly to Florida and convince Diana to come back with him to Colorado in the one week his boss has given him to clean up his act.
A pair of drug dealers — played horrendously by Genesis Rodriguez (The Last Stand) and T.I. (Takers) — and a bounty hunter (Robert Patrick, Lovelace) pursue the pair at length, and the movie fizzles out from there.
In many ways the spiritual successor to director Seth Gordon’s last film, Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief manages to diffuse the different elements of its comedic revenge by way of road trip mash-up into even more absurdly unsatisfying proportions.
The comedy rarely arouses more than a chuckle; the numerous car chases are tedious; and the characters’ serious emotional problems are handled as soap-opera farce. By not settling on one aspect of the film and honing that into something substantial, every layer of Identity Thief is underdeveloped.
Worst of all is the film’s insistence on creating a subplot about the drug dealers and bounty hunter chasing after Sandy and Diana. None of the antagonists accomplishes much of anything throughout the entire film, acting more as distracting tangential filler than anything else.
Despite the incessant failures, however, McCarthy’s performance in this film is absolutely astounding. Whereas Bateman slips into his comfort zone and plays deadpan for nearly two hours, McCarthy brings a great deal of depth to Diana by refusing to stick to the wild physical comedy she’s known for.
For instance, every time we see Diana shopping at the mall, we see her recognize that customers and clerks are laughing at her weight and lack of style. The emotion McCarthy conveys with her face is truly upsetting and only serves to emphasize her need to steal other people’s identities for herself.
While it’s great to see an actress throwing all of her energy into a role, it doesn’t save Identity Thief from being anything else other than another passable rainy-day rental — it might make you smile, but you won’t have to laugh.
