Mild-mannered businessman Sandy Patterson travels from Denver to Miami
to confront the deceptively harmless-looking woman who has been living
it up after stealing Sandy's identity.
Watch Identity Thief Free Movie Streaming Video In HD
Watch Identity Thief Free Movie Streaming Video In HD
Watch Identity Thief Free Movie Streaming Video In HD
Other
than that, that's about all the sympathy I have for the characters in
Seth Gordon's Identity Thief. Overlong, underwritten, and tritely
crafted, this is a perfect example of a comedy in the genre I call "maximum antics, minimum laughter." To qualify for the placement, you
must subject a somewhat interesting premise to more grating physical
schtick than the intelligently crafted kind, which centers around
characters, wit, heart, substance, and wordplay.
As established,
Bateman plays Sandy Bigelow-Patterson, a mild-mannered everyman,
functioning aimlessly in the corporate world that leaves him stuck in
the center of the ladder. He struggles not only with responsibility and a
constant neglect in a pay raise, but with his wife (Amanda Peet) and
two children, whose demands will soon become greater. The last thing
Sandy needs is Diana (Melissa McCarthy), a portly, frantic, remorseless
woman who targets Sandy as the latest victim in her ongoing credit card
fraud scheme by obtaining his information via prank call, making him
believe his credit card account is in jeopardy. It is when him and a
number of his coworkers ditch their dead-end jobs and begin working at a
company created by one of the ex-employees (John Cho) does Sandy feel
his life is on the up-and-up.
Sandy is soon arrested for failing
to appear at a court hearing for Diana, and this is when he discovers he
is a victim of an identity theft. Because the law enforcement of Denver
has a cockamamie list of rules they adhere to, not arresting or even
researching Diana's records since she lives in Winter Park, Florida,
Sandy decides to take matters into his own hands by going down to
Florida to nab Diana and get her to confess to law enforcement and to
his boss to remain secure in his life again. He assumes that because of
Diana's pudgy nature, she'll be an easy catch, until he finds that she's
a violent, dangerous menace that is almost frighteningly haunted and
mentally off balance. Not only that, but both are being pursued by a
witless debt collector and two other assassins that want both dead for
the crimes they've committed or allegedly committed.
What ensues
is a predictable, uneven road comedy between the two, with two actors
swimming in potential, but wasting it in a comedy of tired errors. Jason
Bateman can play straight characters in obscure worlds in a beautiful
way (see Extract for reference), and Melissa McCarthy showed that being
gross can be funny in Judd Apatow's Bridesmaids. Both of their schticks
begin to show signs of wear as Identity Thief haplessly approaches the
hour mark and many laugh-inducing situations have been proposed but none
of them fully exercising them.
Gordon's previous film was Four
Christmases, a film that wasn't as mawkish and oversentimentalized as it
could've been. While it still accentuated a rather negative relation to
the holiday of Christmas and was part of the genre I just spoke of, it
still kept its premise concise and did not overcompensate its material
to a ghastly overlong length. Identity Thief does the opposite. Its
unnecessary sequences involving overweight people having intercourse and
public humiliation are got from the drearily immature cloth I'm growing
ever-so fond of laying in when I watch comedies.
Yet the film
really drops the ball when it attempts to make Diana a character we're
supposed to feel bad for after all her menace, violent nature,
unjustifiable cruelty, and not to mention, her willingness to commit
crimes of sheer carelessness. She is so loathsome that it isn't that her
dramatic instances where her character receives humanization fall flat,
but it's that she's proved herself to be such a smug, arrogant,
astronomically mean-spirited character that it's like trying to accept a
friend back after he's taken advantage of you numerous times. You feel
cheated, used, and now, foolish to consider accepting them back into
your life.
Identity Thief unfortunately subjects its leads into
joyless, gimmicky physical schtick, frequent car chases, and sorely
unfunny scenes that evoke the least common denominator of juvenile
humor. It may not be as unabashedly quirky as some other comedic efforts
I've seen this year, but regarding the cast, the material, and the
ability of the director to create a comfortable, unobtrusive atmosphere,
this endeavor should've much, much funnier.
Starring: Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy, Amanda Peet, and John Cho. Directed by: Seth Gordon.
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Watch Identity Thief Free Movie Streaming Video In HD
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