Plot
Unlimited funds have allowed Diana (McCarthy) to live it up on the outskirts of Miami, where the queen of retail buys whatever strikes her fancy. There’s only one glitch: The ID she’s using to finance these sprees reads “Sandy Bigelow Patterson”….and it belongs to an accounts rep (Bateman) who lives halfway across the U.S.
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Film information
Genre: Comedy, Crime
Movie Reviews:
- 67Entertainment Weekly - by Lisa Schwarzbaum
The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off. ...read more - 63New York Post - by Kyle Smith
Funny and promising as the first act is, the entire second act is pretty awful, as the script chucks in one tiresome, unlikely gag after another. ...read more - 63The Globe and Mail (Toronto) - by Rick Groen
McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it. ...read more - 63USA Today - by Scott Bowles
Preposterous, goofy and a clear ripoff of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Identity still manages to make off with just enough laughs to work, thanks to the wondrous McCarthy, one of the few actresses in Hollywood allowed to showcase her wit and charisma as much as her physique. ...read more - 63Philadelphia Inquirer - by Steven Rea
In some ways, Identity Thief is a raunchier variation on another recent odd-couple road pic: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as overbearing mom and nebbish son in "The Guilt Trip." ...read more - 63Charlotte Observer - by Lawrence Toppman
The dialogue in Craig Mazin’s script crackles at its best, and the supporting characters (led by Robert Patrick as a grizzled skip chaser) have bizarrely funny moments. ...read more - 58Tampa Bay Times - by Steve Persall
Identity Thief is a road movie with its creative lanes clogged, and a Mack truck comedian barreling through, anyway. ... - 58The A.V. Club - by Tasha Robinson
Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map. ...read more - 50New York Magazine (Vulture) - by Bilge Ebiri
Identity Thief is funny enough, but it needed to be darker, raunchier, and crazier to live up to the promise of its casting. ...read more - 50Movie Nation - by Roger Moore
While the filmmakers might have shot for "Midnight Run," but settled for "Due Date," they wound up only achieving "Guilt Trip." Identity Thief is sputtering long before that mid-movie moment when it turns all sentimental and goes off the rails. ...read more - 50Chicago Sun-Times - by Richard Roeper
It wants to be "Midnight Run" meets "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," but it carries little of the dramatic heft and real-world semi-plausibility of those much superior efforts. ...read more - 50The Hollywood Reporter - by Todd McCarthy
With Melissa McCarthy playing a one-woman demolition team who, for 95 percent of the running time, is a genuine affront to nature, there are unavoidably some laughs here, although the gifted comic actor got more of them in less screen time in her previous films than she does in this starring role. ...read more - 50Variety - by Peter Debruge
With Identity Thief, Melissa McCarthy proves she's got what it takes to carry a feature, however meager the underlying material. ... - 45NPR - by Bob Mondello
Such a catalog of missed opportunities, it probably makes sense just to list them. ... - 42Film.com - by Stephanie Zacharek
Watching Identity Thief will steal nearly two hours of your life that you’ll never get back. It takes far more than it gives. ...read more - 40Total Film - by Ken McIntyre
Melissa McCarthy’s over-the-top performance as a low-rung grifter enlivens what is otherwise a groan-worthy odd-couple comedy. ...read more - 40New Orleans Times-Picayune - by Mike Scott
The result is exactly what you would expect from a concept whose odometer has been running for so long: uneven laughs, sparked largely by spurts of shock comedy but marred by a general sense of familiarity. ...read more - 40New York Daily News - by Elizabeth Weitzman
The ensuing road trip should be hilariously chaotic, a classic misadventure between two ill-matched travelers. Instead of “Midnight Run,” though, we get another gloss on the recent “Guilt Trip,” in which the concept is all that counts. ...read more - 40Arizona Republic - by Barbara VanDenburgh
Everyone would have been better off if the editors had just cobbled together a 90-minute blooper reel and called it a day. ... - 40Austin Chronicle - by Louis Black
The film is ultimately unsatisfying, not as laugh-out-loud funny as it promises to be in the opening. ...read more - 40Village Voice - by Alan Scherstuhl
McCarthy gets bashed about like a Stooge, and she bashes back with riotous abandon. Sadly, the rest of the movie is a shambles. So, let it be said, this one time only: Here is a comedy that really could use more inter-gender violence. ... - 40Time Out New York - by David Fear
No matter how may times Identity Thief switches tracks, nothing works — it fails as a star vehicle, a recession-era satire, a WTF white-collar-grunt revenge tale, a "Midnight Run"–style buddy flick, a gross-out laughfest and a bathetic tale of broken souls. No amount of stolen guises can fix it. ...read more - 38St. Louis Post-Dispatch - by Joe Williams
Suffering through this felonious farce could only inspire a prison riot. ...read more - 30Time - by Mary Pols
It’s just a movie, with a dramatic arc that’s supposed to make all that mean stuff drift away into the ether as friendship is born, but it’s that look that hangs around like a bad smell. ...read more - 30Slate - by Dana Stevens
It would be easier to forgive Identity Thief its overfamiliar comic setups and shameless gag-recycling if the movie’s second half didn’t make such an abrupt about-face from soliciting our revulsion to begging for our pity. ...read more - 25ReelViews - by James Berardinelli
This feels a lot like some of the recent, unwatchable Adam Sandler offerings: boorish, unfunny comedy colliding with saccharine, quasi-dramatic filler. ...read more - 25
- 25Boston Globe - by Ty Burr
Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for. ...read more - 25San Francisco Chronicle - by Mick LaSalle
Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy. ...read more - 25Washington Post - by Ann Hornaday
McCarthy’s willingness to go to the mat notwithstanding, it’s viewers who are likely left feeling punched in the gut. ...read more - 25The Playlist - by Drew Taylor
With long stretches (we're talking 20-30 minutes) without a single guffaw, Identity Thief is aggressively dull, and will joylessly steal two hours of your life that you will never get back. ...read more - 25Portland Oregonian - by M. E. Russell
The deadly dull action-comedy Identity Thief is an infuriating waste of time, on all sides of camera and screen. I did not know I could yawn angrily. This movie somehow proved it possible. ...read more - 25New York Observer - by Rex Reed
Identity Thief is so bad it’s hard to believe it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers. ...read more - 0Salon.com - by Andrew O'Hehir
Identity Thief reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy. ...read more - 0Christian Science Monitor - by Peter Rainer
I squirmed in my seat throughout Identity Thief, a colossally unfunny and misguided comedy. ...read more - 0Wall Street Journal - by Joe Morgenstern
Watch the trailer, if you must, but spare yourself the full experience: Identity Thief steals time. ...read more
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