Identity Thief Reviews
Top CriticIt saddles Bateman with a thankless uptight straight-man role while heaping serial slapstick ignominies on his co-star, who gamely bounds through everything the script throws at her.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
Even with all its shortcomings and sentimental fudges, there is something about McCarthy's refusal to lie down and play the victim that gives it a comic edge. A blunt edge, to be sure, but an edge all the same.
[A] sloppily made exercise of rip-offs and redemption.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Considering that it starts out with two distinctive and likable stars and a reasonably promising premise, "Identity Thief" reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy.
Identity Thief apparently forgets it was supposed to be a comedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
"Identity Thief" is a cheap copy of much better comedies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
[Identity Thief] exhausts most of the comic potential from identity theft in the first 20 minutes and then turns into a solid but unexceptional road picture.
Thanks to McCarthy's abundant comic gifts and those of her equally ill-served straight man Jason Bateman, Identity Thief doesn't leave nearly as icky a taste as it could have, but Gordon only taps into a fraction of his actors' potential.
A lot of movies released into theaters deserve the label of "bad." Only a few cross the line into "reprehensible." Say hello to Identity Thief.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
''Identity Thief'' strands these two ordinarily enjoyable comics in the middle of nowhere with no help for miles.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Bateman and McCarthy are left stranded onscreen while we are supposed to be chortling at slobber comedy and fat jokes.
Full Review
| Original Score: F
The whole thing's not much of anything, really - just a little more than an hour-and-a-half of crude jokes and clumsy plotting, all wrapped up with a feel-good ribbon at the end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Really, this a two-hander that unfolds at two distinctly separate speeds.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
We can forgive the silly setup, without which there can be no film, but like many a road movie, this one has a better start and finish than middle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Identity Thief" is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Its stars, Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, steal so many laughs from such improbable places that the bumps in this revenge/road trip farce can be mostly forgiven, though not forgotten.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
[It] 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Has the kind of cast that makes audiences ask, "How bad could it be?" before proceeding to answer that very question.
As is the case with other unsatisfactory diversions, it is entirely possible to ignore the worst parts of this movie, to drift along during the lulls, slide over the half-baked jokes and just wait for Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Bateman to do their things.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
This often very mean-spirited movie about modern rage plays out with nods to several road-trip classics.
The comedy equivalent of mud-wrestling without the mud.
Electronic identity theft offers a host of new possibilities, and to have almost none of them explored by writer Craig Mazin and director Seth Gordon in this uninspired trudge of a road movie is the biggest waste of all.
The darkness in this comedy is exactly what makes it work so well.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
At best it's perversely interesting as a major misstep for both stars.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0/4
If nothing else, Identity Thief confirms McCarthy's identity in the Hollywood hierarchy: She's a big, ballsy star.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it's the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
What success the movie finds is due to the leads' efforts, which are impressively strenuous. They start out with a great premise, and they're clearly ready to run with it. But most of the laughs are stolen right out from under them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The film's few chuckles can be chalked up to the sheer comedic charisma of McCarthy and Bateman.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
"Identity Thief" is mostly noteworthy for reminding us that McCarthy's talents can, indeed, carry a comedy. It's too bad that it had to be this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Gordon is lost, and his style of shooting - telescopic close-ups, which never give us enough space to appreciate the performers - feels wrong for comedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Of the many qualities I adore about Melissa McCarthy as a comedian and as a dramatic actor, the best is how fully she gives herself to every character she plays.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Another rough comic movie road trip helps give car travel a bad name.
With Identity Thief, Melissa McCarthy proves she's got what it takes to carry a feature, however meager the underlying material.
It's a deserving subject that should be explored in a more viable film, but Identity Thief is so bad it's hard to believe it wasn't directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers.
McCarthy gets bashed about like a Stooge, and she bashes back with riotous abandon. Sadly, the rest of the movie is a shambles.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
