Plot
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.
Release Year: 2013
Rating: 5.8/10 (5,457 voted)
Director:Seth Gordon
Storyline
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.
Opening Weekend: $34,551,025
(USA)
(8 February 2013)
Gross: $93,666,560
(USA)(22 February 2013)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Did You Know?
Trivia:
Every car they took, except for the original rental car, has a crushed can of Red Bull on the dash. See more »
Goofs:
When Sandy & Sandy pull over at the underpass while in Florida, overhead signs for Georgia highways are present on the over-passing highway. This same signs are also seen during the car chase with the Skiptracer. See more »
User Review
Your credit card company is only a phone call away
Rating: 4/10
I have sympathy for Jason Bateman's Sandy Bigelow-Patterson for reasons
other than he was victim to identity fraud. Being a male and having the
name "Sandy" sets up a variety of jokes from socially childish people
who have never seen a male with the unisex name of "Sandy." Had it not
been for my sweet mother, I would've been "Michel Pulaski," rather than
"Steven" because of my father's obsession with Canada and their hockey
players and Quebec Nordiques-player Michel Goulet.
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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