![]() ![]() ![]() So Bateman cuts one of those deals that only happen in the movies and is guaranteed that everything will be fixed if he can bring her back to Ohio within a week to confess. Interstate policing politics mean that even though Bateman and the cops know who is responsible for the mess, it’ll be 6-8 months before anything can be resolved. So McCarthy destroys Bateman’s credit in less than a week, which is a real pain because he was just about to land that big job that he always dreamed of. How does the female McCarthy pose as the male Bateman, you ask? Why because his name is the gender neutral Sandy and you’d better find that gag funny because you’ll be hearing it a lot. She then uses that information to make some phony credit cards and IDs to steal his identity and spend a whole bunch of money in wacky montages. Within seconds of the Universal logo appearing on screen, Jason Bateman’s accounting type (the screenwriter doesn’t want you to think too hard about what Bateman does or anything else for that matter) gets a prank call from Melissa McCarthy’s con-woman saying his credit card has been compromised and asking for all his economic info to fix it. If nothing else, you’ve got to give the filmmakers credit for diving into the movie as efficiently as possible. Put simply the movie just doesn’t work, but what’s most heartbreaking about the whole endeavor is the fact that there’s no reason why a movie about identity theft mixing the talents of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman couldn’t work. Pitched somewhere between Midnight Run and Planes, Trains, And Automobiles without a fraction of the charm of either 80s romp, Identity Thief is a movie so desperate for ideas to pad out it’s running time that there’s actually a scene involving snakes slithering into pants that I suppose the audience is supposed to pretend they haven’t seen a bazillion and one times before. It’s the kind of project that comes about when a studio brings together a premise and two appealing leads and then assumes the movie will take care of itself. Movie 43 offered us the horrors of that first type of cinematic crap heap a few weeks back and now along comes Identity Thief to provide a textbook example of the latter. Some bad movies are incomprehensible monuments to failure, while others are just lazy. ![]()
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